Mish-Mosh
There was lots of availability: women obviously wanting to be picked up, showgirls talking to as many bachelors as they could, kids with tight sweaters showing off their muscled chests and rounded asses and thick thighs, girls with pushed-out tits and narrow hips and aggressive walks.
The upper class had matchbook-size Les Mouches stickers on lapel or sleeve; maybe they were guests and maybe it got them free drinks. Spotlights picked out couples dancing but I didn't know who they were. Pink, red, blue, white, orange, yellow gels were changed to reflect musical nuances of noise or tempo. Every so often a favorite would come on and there'd be a shout from the bystanders and they'd cascade off the tiers, arms waving, to dance to their pre-set rhythms. The "drunk" tuxedo lurched past without a shirt, and I hoped it might go farther.
I fantasized that this WAS pleasure: the grinning faces, the pleasure at the intricate dance steps, the drinking and smoking and eating and necking and cruising. Not much to spend after entering, everyone out for sheer fun, no one falling-down drunk, no one POOR.
Some people weren't having fun: couples dancing split apart, waving disgustedly at each other, and stopped dancing; women curtly refused to dance with tacky-looking men; dancers collided and some ended on the floor; wistful looks from the fire inspectors showed they weren't getting what they wanted, even though they'd been dancing with 5-6 women through the evening. Fat old women tried looking sexy in draped russet silks and failed; old men sweated more than was seemly; people started leaving.
Fewer of the paid dancers seemed to be around: maybe they'd done their job and were free to leave. Some may have only been guests as they refused to dance as they wished. A chipper young woman pushed a rocking old man onto the center of the floor in a wheelchair and proceeded to lead him through a few slow patterns: he didn't seem to be smiling but he didn't seem unhappy, only slightly out of his milieu. More cruising seemed to be going on: men introducing friends to other men, longing looks at solos with sexy legs and thick chests. I remained invisible.
Men stared across and came over to talk to women; it all seemed very simple. There had been a spotlight trained on one wall and people danced self-consciously there, obviously wanting to be looked at and obviously concerned that they had to dance there in order to be looked at. The young muscle-builder in the tight sweater occasionally looked at men, and some of the tuxedos dancing together made it look like a dignified 12 West. A dancer in a strikingly tailored white tux danced with a woman in a black tux with a red carnation, obviously a choreographed team. Another tuxedoed woman swirled her redlined cape. More shirts came off, torsos sweating and clean, but a tiny woman rebuked her husband and buttoned his shirt over his hairy chest. She just couldn't compete?
I ate more pretzels, cookies, goldfish crackers, peanuts; the floor was getting dirty---no barefoot dancing here. Drinks were spilled, glasses broke, a waiter started and looked at his finger as he picked up a broken glass.
Flocks of people gathered around the bare-chested bartender and I wondered how he kept his flesh warm in the cooling evening as people left about 2 am. The restaurant attendant left but when I wandered back the tables were mainly filled in the black room. More tuxedoed men wandered across the edges of the dance floor; a news vendor came in with packs of tabloids under his arm: this was a theater-opening party, after all, but I later saw Stephen Sondheim behind his graying beard going alone to reclaim his coat: it might not have been a triumph.
Woman in flounced Spanish dresses came in, lifting their legs and twisting their feet in skilled dancing; the man in the tuxedo put his shirt back on; men in pink shorts danced together. No one touched except a straight couple rubbing backsides together: she a beautiful blond, he a tawdry middle-aged man in droopy corduroy pants and scuffed suede shoes.
The Chinese women kept pushing themselves onto different men; a plain black woman seemed to dance a lot with older more desperate men; an elegant black woman in a Thai silk dress danced with grace with a shorter man in leather baggies and a 50's sport jacket. Maybe they were from the play. Older women left more and more, eyes crinkled from makeup, smiles frozen.
A handsome single guy fell asleep on the step below me; a crewcut fellow kept looking at him: cruising. Drunk now, the fire inspectors began horsing around with each other: dancing with women, they'd face each other and grind their hips in a fierce challenge to their masculinity---they didn't seem to be quite sure they wanted the women they'd found.
Others kept looking, kept trying. The photographers who'd lain on the floor to focus upward for crotch-shots of straight and gay couples had left, their pictures taken, though WHO they were of was another question entirely.
More women began dancing together; new patterns of lights appeared, silver reflections multiplied; sirens blared, whistles blew from skaters. Arms flailed about and now dancers were falling, drunk, of their own accord. The cruiser moved closer to the sleeping hunk, asking him to wake up. The Chinese women left, though I couldn't tell if they left with someone. The leader of the fire inspectors advanced on his plainer friend, wiggling his shoulders seductively and bumping with fierce intensity; the other stared and then punched him on the left pectoral.
The cruiser seemed to be massaging the sleeper's wrist; on my left, someone shouted down something to him; I imagined they were all friends. Shadows jumped across the walls from the lightshow, fewer screamed and leapt into dancing at their favorite songs, more left. The sleeper's wristwatch band was now loosened, the lights leaped, and then the watch was gone and the cruiser moved away, looking over his shoulder, to get his coat. Later, another solo sexy friend of the sleeper came over and slapped his face and pushed him into belligerent wakefulness. I left before I saw what his reaction to his missing watch was.
More cruising; more virtuoso dancing in separate corners with their own magic reflected lights, looking like pink and blue kisses scurrying across the floor. All the fruit was gone, now only a few panniers of peanuts and pretzels and goldfish left; the apple container was dry, only water left. Attendants were more visible in the crowd picking up glasses and carting them to the green trays around the walls. People leaving the restaurant carried bags of food and waiters came across with what looked like pizza boxes.
At 2:30 the crowd had diminished but the music retained its fierceness and the blinds isolating the inner room rose and fell, giving opportunity for dramatic sweeps aside of the curtains to enter or leave, or to dance on either side of. Light patterns repeated, though some effects seemed new. Spotlights were manned, then not manned, then left alone entirely. The cold seemed to increase; never any action in the antiseptic men's room that was increasingly littered with wet paper towels. Coat racks began to look bare; the side rooms which once had a smattering of people were now empty. Still, no boozy vomiting drunks, no violence but the stolen watch, no loud arguments. Elegant blond woman in pegged leisure suit struts with suspendered partner who really can't dance; reminding me to the handsome tall slender fellow with a pretty date who seemed SO wrecked with something that he couldn't lift his shoes off the floor when he danced, shambling like his legs were about to collapse.
I thought to leave, but paid a last visit to the bar, where the muscles were making up lists of the day's receipts; to the empty john; to the food, now reduced to one pannier of goldfish; and lines of people waiting for their coats. The restaurant was empty but for some necking couples, but the décor didn't look too different from the dance floor: black and dim. Slow music now permitted people to touch and cling to each other, and the muted lightshow seemed almost poetic by comparison with the early frenzy. More attendants than guests now, but there seemed to be no efforts to make them leave, accepting whoever wanted to dance as long as they wanted to, even to the point of removing their coats on the way out for one last fling. Formally attired man snitching one last bloom from the ravaged flower display as I make my way to the elevator at the end, with about a dozen people left, fewer than the crowd of two dozen there when we entered almost 42 hours earlier.
I figured I got my $5 admission charge worth of food and snacks and experience, wondered if the sleeper would return the next night with a new watch to be taken, wondered how many of the costumes would be changed and the same people returned. It would be fun enough for the first time, and maybe I could fool myself into thinking that the second time was different, but I saw people who had been there and been there, and they weren't enjoying it nearly as much as the effort they put into it would have justified. It's nice to know it's there, but it's also good that one isn't FORCED to go there.
ESSAYS 38
10/17/80
TWO HOMOSEXUALITIES
On page 180 of Updike's "Picked-Up Pieces" he speaks of Borges and "the affection with which he writes elsewhere of male friends like Alfonso Reyes and Macedonio Fernandez. This is at the opposite pole from homosexuality; femaleness, far from being identified with, is felt as a local estrangement that blends with man's cosmic estrangement." I'm angered by the implied equals sign of the semicolon between homosexuality and femaleness. He's not LIKED homosexuality in other books, yet seems more feminine than male himself, could be some old dyke photographed on the cover of that book. Yet AMY'S implication of my homosexuality DEMANDING anal-passive-receptive-feminine activity from me ALSO irritated me. Even EB III irks in V:107: "homosexuality, also called SEXUAL INVERSION, the sexual attraction of a person to one of the same sex (Greek homo-, "same"; not from Latin homo, "man"). This deviation usually but not always leads to physical contact culminating in orgasm---accounts of homosexuality were available for 76 out of 190 (primitive) societies. Of these, in 49 (64 percent) the practice was accepted as normal. ... more likely among men than women to be characterized by a divorce of sexual activity from affection or a stable relationship." 16:603 neatly contradicts the (64 percent) by saying "Though the most prevalent deviation, its frequency is unknown, largely because its being considered both sinful and illegal in most societies (I guess it depends on who's counting!). ... in a man's fear of not seeming manly ... most people are heterosexual, a smaller number can enjoy both sexes (bisexualism), and a still smaller number exclusively prefer people of the same sex. (I bet that's just plain WRONG!). Male homosexuals can be habitually effeminate (note which comes first!), intermittently so, or habitually masculine. The most effeminate restrict their behavior to their version of a woman's role, not only mimicking nonsexual femininity but also enjoying being seduced and overpowered by their partner, receiving penises into their anus, mouth, or hand and disliking the inserter role. (Then another whole long paragraph on the effeminate drag ball.) Most male homosexuals are less effeminate, revealing their effeminacy only when safely with other homosexuals (!!!). Finally, there are habitually masculine men, who, with no apparent wish to simulate femaleness, still choose other males exclusively for sexual pleasure, with few even exaggerating their masculinity in dress and manner. 48 (versus 49, as normal) Where true homosexuality does exist, natives, when questioned, have simply been amused that it could conceivably be banned. Nevertheless, M.K. Opler has noted: Actually, no society, save perhaps ancient Greece, pre-Meiji Japan, certain top echelons in Nazi Germany, and the scattered examples of such special status groups as the berdaches, Nata slaves, and one category of Chukchee shamans, has lent sanctions in any real sense to homosexuality." (And people BELIEVE him??) (Arabic cultures not noted at ALL??) All vertebrates, including man, have sufficient equipment to indulge in homosexual behavior (then goes on to describe MOUNTING---so ANIMAL homosexuality, which is observable ONLY by mounting, is carried over into HUMAN homosexuality, which (surprise!!!) can go far beyond (and away from) mounting as the ONLY expression of affection between same-sexed partners.... Treating effeminate male homosexuals with male hormones, however, has not resulted in more manliness but rather in an intensification of their sexual excitement with the same effeminate behavior as before. ... In general, psychoanalysts consider homosexuality a result of severe anxiety in childhood, not a variant of normality. The main article's reference to Kabuki leads to a discussion of "catamites" and the reference to prison deprivation talks of "rape," so here, too, the emphasis is anal. BUT THERE IS ANOTHER HOMOSEXUALITY: where the man's body is almost worshipped, where the penis is so desired that there's disappointment if it disappears from sight into the anus or even the mouth (which can taste, I think, far more fully than the ass), and where there IS affection and a stable relationship---as a relationship for four or five years IS, which is more than most marriages WOULD have if there weren't laws and mores to keep the partners together. No WONDER men are uptight about being considered gay: their activities would then, they think, have to include either fucking (which I agree is messy) or being fucked (which I agree is painful), RATHER than something as stimulating as looking, talking, necking, exciting, and masturbation, alone or mutual, to bring off a better-felt orgasm than available through someone ELSE'S ministration, whether a woman's cunt or a man's asshole. What a pity the law-oriented gay liberation movement doesn't take this into account: the education of the public actually FALLS when it comes to the determination that anal intercourse isn't the only (or maybe even the PREFERRED) mode of interaction between (and among) male homosexuals---masculine male homosexuals, to further adapt the EB discrimination against the effeminate. I may not have been MASCULINE as a child, but I CERTAINLY wasn't feminine, except as the dichotomizing public must have labeled a boy who didn't play baseball in the summer, football in the fall, basketball in the winter, or enjoy "working out" in the gym, except as a place to see naked men in the shower. The ONLY erotic scene in "Sebastian" was the one in which the two humpy men obviously enjoyed each other's bodies and sensuality. "Caligula" is probably disgusting because of the fucking, and even when Charles Laughton's Nero is pictured with a beautiful man, his hair is curled and his face simpers to make him as effeminate as possible, even though he DOES have lovely muscles on his arms and chest. Thinking of the masculine male homosexual, too, the public usually makes the leap to motorcyclists and SM addicts, with again no room left between for a more NORMAL enjoyment of men, cocks, orgasms, masculine affection and ideals and bodies, that I and so many others seem to enjoy. But, like movies in which there is no suspense or crisis, these items don't make NEWS because they're NOT as photogenic, they're NOT as headline-worthy, they're NOT sensational or bizarre or fascinating, they're merely affection and happiness and love and warmth and loving-kindness, without being FEMININE in any way at all---unless being near a man without wanting to arm wrestle, cuss, drink, or slay has to be TERMED feminine by an over-dichotomizing and over-macho world. "A Perfect Summer" seemed merely simpery by showing two men having fun leaping in the surf. What a pity that the OTHER homosexuality isn't more pictorial, attractive, and vote-getting.
ESSAYS - 41
10/17/80
TWO J/O NIGHTS AT J'S
A perfect example of the dichotomy is Tuesday versus Monday at J's for J/O. Tuesday is fucking (or fist fucking, but who kisses fists?), and what cocksucker who doesn't care for the taste of shit would put himself into the position of sucking on a cock that's been up someone's ass (probably diseased)? I remembered how depressed and turned-off I was when someone that I'd earlier been attracted to debased himself by being fucked or fist-fucked in the middle of the room: didn't he value HIMSELF enough to want to be related to face-to-face, with his own cock valued? Why are so many cocks by people being fucked and fist-fucked limp and flaccid? Not having fun? Monday is jerking off and looking and enjoying and talking and KNOWING that the cock is going to be relatively clean, and that no one's going to be shoving his ass into your cock---or, I hope, pissing in your hand, either. Dennis was puzzled when John, the owner, went down on him, but I suggested that he was only taking into account that it was Tuesday, and that people were there to be impressed in "one" homosexuality way: that of macho doing and taking into the mouth without gagging, rather than worshipping the cock and the body as would be more likely on Monday night. Also, it seems a cop-out: when I go down on someone it's nice because my usually just-come cock isn't working anymore, and I don't want it to be so obvious. But the best activity of all is standing face-to face, fondling bodies and cocks and tits, necking and caressing, enjoying and talking and pausing and smiling and joking and laughing and stimulating, sometimes with the mouth, to be sure, but usually drawing back to take a long close look, wetting so that it slips more easily, wetting to heighten the electricity between the bodies when the cocks are crushed inside in a heavenly hug. THIS is the other homosexuality that should be more played out on the screens: witness my disgust when BEAUTIFUL people end up eating assholes (Who'd want to kiss anyone THERE? Who'd want to kiss the lips that had been THERE?) and no showing off their beautiful bodies and more beautiful cocks and even more beautiful orgasms, the crown of the crown of the cock, the best moment of all.
ESSAYS 42
2/8/81
EFA MEETING 11/25/80
Barbara Rodriguez replaced by George Maldonado, Manager of American Society of Chemical Engineers (ASCE). WORD PROCESSING. Peter Adams, HBJ.
MTST: Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter is about 150 words per minute.
First MTST's were critical for periodicals, now in books.
STANDING TEXT used in going through successive EDITIONS of books.
Greatly used in REPETITIVE letter writing.
Great initial expenditures.
Lots of "Wait and see": lots of companies go out of business in two years, but no IBM, Xerox, or Pitney-Bowles.
Lots of LEGAL software available.
Typesetting ALREADY affected; newspapers beginning to be affected.
Freelance word processing will PROBABLY start IN-HOUSE.
15-16 type faces in 6-15 point types at HBJ NOW!
$8000 Shaftstall Box converts ALMOST any input to ALMOST any other.
More and more publishers getting their OWN photocomposers.
In-house now LIMITED to lower-cost, simpler photocomposition.
Specific compositor: $25/hr for 2-page manual; 3 hour minimum.
Trend will be MORE user-oriented, English-language oriented.
Vydec? Not EASY to use at all. Wang CAME OUT simple.
How will voice-activated equipment handle bow/bough??
Will ALWAYS require BETTER proofreaders?
Machinery would hyphenate bal-lpoint pen!
Learn to use it? ABSOLUTELY!
Error and reliability? Survey and evaluation? Questions to be asked.
$250-300 will get you trained on A word processor---but 12 of them?
More machines WILL have self-teaching programs.
$15/hr to $25/hr for self-learning, MAYBE 2 hours for FAST learners.
Cost of New Era is now between $10,000 and $25,000.
TOO expensive AND incompatible for SINGLE user.
SCHOOLS for word processing NOW are no good.
BEGINNING to be word processing shops, for hourly rate.
Check yellow pages in telephone: WORD PROCESSING SERVICE BUREAUS
Engel is getting 100 books from National Endowment of Arts to INDEX!
$6 floppy disk: 40-60 pages/disk; need 12-15 for 700-page book.
Bubble memory is a real breakthrough in storage.
Learn the SYSTEM that's compatible with your PUBLISHERS' EQUIPMENT!
Wang, IBM (Olivetti has a terrible reputation), Xerox 850, Adressograph-Multigraph, Exxon's QUIX "an intelligent typewriter" AND upgradeable.
You DO get eye fatigue, so CHECK screen.
Dictaphone ZOOM DOUBLES page size.
Cheaper machines have HIGHER blink rate and FEWER refresh cycles.
Single-line self-correcting typewriters are NOT computers.
ADMINISTRATIVE MANAGEMENT and OFFICE PROCEDURES do SURVEYS YEARLY.
DATAPRO and AUERBACK and VISION 80 do periodic updates.
INTERNATIONAL TYPOGRAPHIC CORPORATION does survey every 3-4 years.
Department of Commerce SURVEY on radiation STUDY showed "No harmful effects." Henry Engel said he'd send me a copy when he got it. No eye damage SUITS ever AWARDED.
COMPSET compositing machine.
Stay away from Weeks Temp and Cyberway.
Phone Wang, IBM, Xerox, and ask for intros.
ESSAYS 46
3/3/81
JOE McGINNISS: GOING TO EXTREMES---BOOK
Amy lends me this book on Alaska, saying I'll love it. I find nice things:
P. 52: "I remembered hearing about the soldier who had gone on winter maneuvers outside of Fairbanks. He had brought along a flask to keep him warm. He unscrewed the cap, took a gulp at 50 below, and dropped dead, his throat frozen shut. The alcohol had kept the liquid from freezing at that temperature, but the liquid, at 50 below, had produced the opposite of the desired warming effect.
P. 73: talks of "Barrow's fist brush" where it should be FIRST brush!
P. 87: (On Nome): tourists ... walked up and down Front Street and choked on the dust and watched Eskimos puke on each other. Then the mosquitoes got to them and they ran for their rooms---sixty-four dollars a night at the Nugget---and pleaded with Wien to fly them out.
P. 127: Spend a week in Juneau, especially with a couple of sunny days, and you think you would like to live there for the rest of your life. But stay for three months, especially in winter, and you would give a year of your life just for a weekend out of town.
P. 242: (On Brooks Range) The worst of the mosquito season, in northern Alaska, means you keep your entire body covered and wear a net around your face and the net is so quickly covered with mosquitoes the size of nickels and dimes that you can't even see where you are going. And if you live in a village and own dogs, you rub motor oil inside the dogs' noses and inside their ears, so the mosquitoes and ghats will not crawl in and begin to eat the inside of the dogs' heads.
So the writing is somewhat colorful, if somewhat fragmented (example from p. 16: The action was not in California any more. As far as Sandy could tell, it was not anywhere. Gone. Poof. Just like that. So, gradually, aimlessly, almost imperceptibly, she drifted up the coast. Carried along on some sort of psychological ebb tide of the early seventies. San Francisco, Portland, Eugene, Seattle, and, eventually, Juneau, Alaska. The end of the line. Such a haunted, beautiful, somber, mysterious, deadening town. Where all the driftwood finally came to rest. And then slowly rotted in the rain.) Maybe he got paid by the punctuation mark?
But even in the book's apotheosis, when he finds a miraculous meadow in uncharted mountains and valleys around Cocked Hat Mountain, he stumbles: (P. 279-80) "Shangri-la. The meadow so pristine, so silent, so still. Its lushness even more incongruous against the starkness of the spires which rose so bizarrely above it, with lingering mist brushing lightly against the tips.
We were not sure whether we had entered a cathedral or whether we had stumbled across the gateway to a lost, forbidden land. Even now the last survivors of an unknown, undiscovered civilization might be watching us, in silence, or darting quickly, high above us, from rock to rock.
But no. All was still. There was nothing here. There never had been." Ray Bane tried it too: "The great swirls of rock strata, splendid spires, and ponderous slabs---a symphony in rock."
But it was pleasant to read with the Alcan Highway, Portage Glacier, Fairbanks, the train down to Anchorage, and the flights to Inuvik and Point Barrow so fresh in my mind---even though he bogs down when he gets into the politicking and haggling over the new capital, and how MANY times can you say that people like to get dead drunk??
ESSAYS 48
3/3/81
RICHARD BACH: ILLUSIONS: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
It's a detail that I think HE thinks HE'S a better messiah than Don Shimoda.
P. 3: I do not enjoy writing at all.
P.33 (Don Shimoda): "And you think you'll be led to a teacher who can help you."
P. 47 (DS): We're all the sons of God, or children of the Is, or ideas of the Mind, or however else you want to say it.
P. 58 (from Messiah's Handbook): Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers, teachers.
P. 63 (MH): You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self.
P. 120 (MH): You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however.
P. 176 (DS): "The Is doesn't need me to tell anybody how it works."
P. 177 (MH): The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
But there IS a good feeling that the stuff he writes, though terrifically simplistic, MIGHT put people onto reading MORE Zen-like things that he keeps going at---and it IS nice that SIMPLE people ARE reading him, since it went through three printings (at least) in June of 1979. Though it leads people to say silly things about it like the inscription: "To Our Friend Amy on her 30th Birthday. Thanks for helping us to see what isn't there. Much Love, Carol and Al." But I suppose it's STILL better than nothing, even though Amy didn't care for being given a paperback of the book that I guess she already has in hardcover.
ESSAYS 53
3/3/81
TAPE WITH HAIR ANALYSIS
I listen to tape from 2:55 pm - 3:35 pm on 2/8/81, nearly a month ago!
1) MINERALS catalyze enzymes, enzyme action may cause imbalances.
The ratio of calcium to magnesium should be 6.711
2) I NEED magnesium; I'm sensitive to sugar, alcohol, refined carbohydrates.
3) High sodium and potassium means HIGH ADRENAL---sensory/emotional/mental STRESS.
4) Slightly restrict salt; better to regulate adrenals: recommend Thym-Adrenal
5) Do POORLY with carbohydrates, WELL with fats and proteins.
6) Take COPPER to up IRON deficiency.
7) LEAVE manganese deficiency alone.
8) Take ZINC for energy and SEX.
9) Teeth COULD be weak because of immune system, which is helped by zinc.
10) Low CHROMIUM hurts carbohydrate handling.
11) Selenium levels not recorded.
12) Phosphorus FROM fish, meat, chicken.
13) Anti-stress pak FOR a fast oxidizer---who NEEDS protein and fat in diet.
14) WATCH diet and REGULAR meals, which means BREAKFAST, LUNCH, AND DINNER. Vegetables (for bulk and fiber for elimination) and some occasional fruit.
15) Need to take supplements with FOOD, not separately.
16) TEETH problem means that whole body is out of balance.
17) Need a low-dose vitamin C.
18) STILL take vitamin C, 1g, 10,000 vitamin A good; NOT large as 400 units for E; FDA will BAN B-15 as carcinogenic. Calcium lactate, gotu kola, selenium all OK. DISCONTINUE theraform-M, take CHELATED minerals and anti-stress pak for ME. Lecithin and brewer's yeast OK.
19) Take NOTE of physical changes and FILL out SECOND form---6 months or a YEAR is OK.
20) Toxic minerals: cadmium is INDUSTRIAL pollutant, or CIGARETTE smoke. Stay away. Zinc ANTAGONIZES cadmium, too.
21) Ni is OK (scale is changing currently)
22) Molybdenum was unmeasured.
23) Call for Cosmic Mother with loving, supportive, caring---for assimilation and elimination.
24) WHOLE grains, BROWN rice---NO canned and frozen foods.
25) Include SPROUTS---high-enzyme foods.
26) Bowel movement at least once a day. More fiber will help. If constipation is persistent---let HER know---either letter or phone.
27) If OTHER problems, let her KNOW.
28) HOLD supplements in hand and LIGHT them and assimilate on ALL LEVELS---work in CONSCIOUSNESS as well as on the physical level.
29) NO amyl nitrate---NOT good for liver---has to be detoxified. Side effects NOT fully understood---as well as "consciousness factors associated with these drugs."
30) Teeth---she assumes I'm under the care of a good dentist.
31) Cut down on SUGARY FRUIT JUICES and sugary WINE. Drink dry RED wines.
32) My father was probably a fast oxidizer.
33) AVOID ice creams and sweets if there's a CHOICE; avoid catsup and mayonnaise: sugars.
34) "The Supermarket Hand book" by Goldbeck---for additive-free foods by country-section.
35) Regular exercise is very good.
36) Phone: Katie Dusenberg, living in Costa Mesa Center/3305 South Kimber St./ Santa Ana, CA 92702/ (714) 957-9346 or 549-7732.
ESSAYS 55
4/29/81
ASIS MEETING ON MICROCOMPUTERS 4/28
I had three glasses of wine, three hunks of cheese, and loneliness from 5:35-6:10.
Meeting with 240 people from 6:29-7:17 with Haas of Apple's Computer Era Corp.
Mainframe computers sell for $100,000 and up; minis, which started in 1965, from $50,000-$200,000 for multi-terminal systems, while Micros, which started in 1975 with the MITS Altair, go from $3,000-$20,000, with $6-8,000 for the usual business computer. There are three types of programs:
1) Planning and progression programs, like Execuplan and Visicalc, each for $150, which do budgeting and financial operations.
2) Text-Word Processing like Memorite on Vector Graphic, printing letter-quality printing at about one page per minute; you can do book publishing with it, telephone interface possible.
3) Database management and inventory, with selective mailing lists, and publishers use it with sorting for indexes of information on certain articles, which sounds interesting to me.
4) Custom programming, simple on both machines.
APPLE is built piece-by-piece, 40 character/line MAXIMUM (really?)---NO, not with Don's letter of THIS MORNING!! ALL uppercase on screen, but uppercase /lowercase on printer. 143K/diskette.
VECTOR GRAPHIC has built-in units, 80 character/line; 315K/diskette SIDE, or 630K for BOTH diskette sides, 12,600 lines of 50-character lines. 5,000K storage for $8,000.
7:18-7:35: Intner bought a micro (Apple) for when MINI/(LIBX-100, supported by CLSI, went down) which crashed for 10 days, then for a week. CTI (where she got the Apple from) trains program users, using Apple II+. Hardware, 2 mini-disks and TV and 5 floppy diskettes and master and backup and Apple-soft manuals. Calls for help at toll free number gives MOST cheerful help. She told me that the Apple was down MUCH less than the LIBS-100, but then it's only USED 1/5 the time. Don says paddle-maintenance was all his needed, for the kids' use. CTI is in Provo, Utah, and documentation is POOR. Light-pen unit available. 16% LIBS-100 downtime! Left before demonstration to see "The Hand" with Dennis and eat dinner at Les Sans-Culottes until cabbing home.
DIARY 91281
3/30/78
MISCELLANEOUS HATES (contd from DIARY 9607)
17. Horrible neighbors for a subscription ballet or opera series for DAYS.
18. Apartment robbers who make friends' lives (Dennis) miserable for them.
THE FOLLOWING JOTTED 12/9/72 in the back of Bharati "The Tantric Tradition":
19. Stores that blare music into the streets.
20. Kids who don't watch when crossing streets.
21. Middle-age women frozen behind false eyelashes and impasto lipstick.
22. Old women who have nothing better to do than totter along sidewalks in safety-pinned overcoats.
23. Car horns that play "Here Comes the Bride."
24. Discounts "as low as the law allows."
25. J.T. Farrell's Lonergan: "They're not in Russia ... beat them up until they love the USA."
26. Young blacks with nothing to do but stand around in corner gangs.
27. People who leave newspapers to blow all over subway cars and highways and streets.
28. Laws against prostitution, gambling, gayness.
29. No parking zones in front of churches.
30. Non-ticketed cars in no parking zones.
31. Anyone smoking cigars.
32. Litterbugs.
33. Stores that don't stock GOOD cereals.
34. 754 for dry cleaning a scarf for "handling."
35. $55 for fixing a $120 tape recorder.
36. The lack of maintenance people to fix old car doors or radios.
37. Chimneys that belch soot.
38. Drivers who race their motors needlessly.
39. Blue laws on store hours.
40. Having to check your brain before working.
41. Multi-painted cabinets that don't close.
42. Subway windows that don't take $10's or $20's.
43. People who want you to convert to their religion.
44. Guys who kick beer cans over at orgies.
45. Guys who come to, but never host, orgies.
46. Guys who rifle pants pockets at orgies.
47. Cops who accept payoffs.
48. People with frowns on their faces.
49. Industries that pollute rivers and lakes and the air.
50. Detergents that are non-biodegradable.
51. People who consider other races inferior.
52. Buses that spew exhaust.
53. Subway cars with poles ONLY at doors.
54. Women who color their hair.
55. Laws designed to keep lawyers in business.
56. Companies that exploit cheap foreign labor in cheap foreign countries.
57. Banks that give less interest than others.
58. Stores that sell only creamer-sugar bowl sets.
59. Punks that draw on subway maps and windows.
60. Women shoppers on rush-hour subways.
61. Wig-wearers.
62. Conservatives who automatically hate anyone with long hair.
63. Babies who pretend to be crying.
64. Babies who put their feet on you in subways.
65. Co-workers who eat lunch while working.
66. Drivers who abandon their cars on roads.
67. Cities that don't clear their streets or raze burnt buildings.
68. Stores that rip off ghetto dwellers.
69. Plastic furniture covers.
70. Cloth raincoats that don't stay waterproof.
71. Drivers who stall when the light is green then race through the red.
72. Conservatives who revile parties to mixed marriages.
73. Conservatives who revile gays showing affection in public.
AND MORE CURRENT ONES
74. Public employees who rip off everyone by lying about overtime hours.
75. Index-strip cards that are too stiff to tear apart without hurting hands.
76. $9 for a bar of Erno Laszlo soap where the "secret is the hottest water."
77. Restaurant "discounts" that take more time than the money they save.
78. Practically all airlines regulating agencies for keeping travel prices high.
DIARY 13432
9/25/78
PRESENCE IS FACING ME / SINE ON CIRCLE IS A O
Working with elaborate lines of force connecting the dynamics and magnetics as if these were on the SAME side, but it occurs to me that they might be turned to FACE (JUST AS IN GATHERING, THE PHRASE IS "TURN TO"!!!---just thought of that NOW) each other, so that it's a simple sweep out to the side, as it is in the group work with the teacher facing the student(s). And it feels much better to look at it this way, too, since otherwise you'd be in a "nested spoon" position, leading one to ask "who's fucking who?" when it comes to deciding who's nested inside who. But the "face to face" method seems much more direct and simple, and operatively cleaner, and probably true. Then I think of frequencies again, maybe connected with thoughts about DIARY 13399, and tried to think of a sine-wave going around a sphere again, which had come out to be a figure 8 before, and this time it seems to come out a CIRCLE, which is appealing since it would mean that in a CERTAIN dimension, a frequency wave isn't GOING anywhere, they'd just be making larger and larger, or smaller and smaller, CIRCLES, and it occurs to me at THIS instant that THESE CIRCLES MAY BE WHEELER'S particles and properties of particles being produced SIMPLY BY THE ACTION OF GEOMETRY ON EMPTY SPACE. FREQUENCY (some distance per some time periodicity) seems to be so BASIC that it's appealing to work with, and I wonder what kind of FREQUENCY would lead to a CIRCLE which would have the diameters of protons and electrons and quarks! THAT would imply ever-nested Chinese boxes, too, since there's not any EASY upward limit of frequency as there is of LOWER frequencies (one per universe, as referred to from some earlier page, on DIARY 13399), since ANY NUMBER of cycles per second seems possible at the speed of light, just making VERY small entities, much smaller than quarks, unless there IS some basic time unit, as described somewhere else, but that recedes as science gets "closer and closer" merging into the undefinability of observation so totally affecting activity that it becomes a model of LIFE: OBSERVATION OF WHICH MAKES IT GO, DISTURBS IT, SO ONLY THE CESSATION OF OBSERVATION OF LIFE WOULD RESULT IN THE STOPPING OF NATURE---if YOU stop the world, EVERYONE WILL GET OFF!
DIARY 13399
9/15/78
HOW TO "SEE" INSIDE BODY / IDEA OF SECONDS PER SECOND
Eyes closed during bodywork, I want to "see," for example, my testicle, but then the idea bothers me: if my EYES could be placed INSIDE my scrotum, I would see only darkness ANYWAY, since THAT WAVELENGTH OF LIGHT THAT MY EYE CAN SEE doesn't penetrate the skin of the scrotum. So it would either be an IMAGINARY seeing: a seeing INDEPENDENT of the ACTUAL testicle, though it may be accurate as an IMAGE, or seeing the ACTUAL testicle IN ANOTHER KIND OF LIGHT. Think of the Theosophy and Actualism emphasis on "different frequencies" and encounter the familiar "well, all frequencies are on a continuum anyway, so a lower LIGHT frequency would just be a different color, just as a lower frequency in the SOUND range is a different NOTE or TONE (interesting anagrams---enot/ENTO/eont/eotn/eton/etno/neot/neto/NOET/NOTE/nteo/ntoe/oent/oetn/onet ONTE/OTEN/otne/teno/tneo/tnoe/toen/TONE)." Then think of a different "kind" of frequency that would run ALONGSIDE the normal electromagnetic spectrum, which could be said to move, in time, at ONE SECOND PER SECOND. But next to that could be a spectrum moving at ONE-HALF SECOND PER SECOND, which would take twice as (own) long to go as long in (their) events; or two seconds per second, which would go twice as fast as events in our time, and our "time rate" would OBSCURE their "time rate," in ordinary conditions, unless our CLOSED eyes could BYPASS our CLOSING EYELIDS and "see" at the adjacent rate! [DETAILED DRAWING] So if my EYES could switch to the TWO-SECONDS-PER-SECOND track, and look at ANYTHING inside on the two-seconds-per-second track, all the intervening one-second-per-second structures would be invisible (eyelids, scrotum, etc), and the two-second-per-second light would illuminate both the eye and the scrotum and I could SEE it, without quotes around the word. DISTANCES might not be the same on that track, since Cayce would see bodies BEFORE him, though his eyes weren't near those organs on THIS frequency track. And since OUR "dimension" of frequencies is continuous and relatively limitless (what's beyond---slower than---one time per eternity, as written in some OTHER DIARY page?), so that PERPENDICULAR dimension is continuous and relatively limitless. A GREAT INTERESTING IDEA. Also, the "units" of the frequency in parallel tracks would be "unitless," since ANY N sec/sec would have the seconds cancel, and the "property" would be a "unitless" PURE NUMBER. DRAWING the figure on the right reminds me of Wheeler's "cosmic needle," and there could be other "realities" with the same "thread" (see ABOVE)!!
DIARY 92030
11/22/77
HETEROSEXUAL PLAYING
Plato's Retreat sounded like fun, so I went to enjoy the heterosexual version of the homosexual baths.
DIARY 8899
9/7/74
FRUITFUL THOUGHTS ON WRITING
Woke at 11:35 this morning, feeling as if I'd smoked (which I hadn't) and sexed (which I had) all night, and my neurasthenic brain came up with the m, mv, mc2 progression of units and concepts, and wondered what application could be made if the progression were continued: mv3, mv4, m2c3, etc. The basic thought was that the three "basic" units could be thought of as equivalent to the three dimensions. Einstein revolutionized physics by linking time as a fourth dimension; why couldn't these three "units" be thought of as "basic dimensions" of action/reaction/movement/energy, and develop concepts of fields of action for "extended" dimensions in those terms. I immediately linked this to the thought of 4 and 5-D sex planes, and planes of interplanetary communication, and ESP, and Oruborous-type metaphysics, but then felt depressed since this was just another gimmicky idea, and I recalled Sheckley's advice to make it into a story.
So I had to have conflict, and suspense, and a character. There has to be "must but cannot," in Meredith's terms. Thought about various ways to pit people against each other, but always came out in stupid wartime tales that I dislike, and thought that I would stand as the basis: the individual against the forces of stability, sanity, the establishment, people saying it couldn't be done. Then I moved to the person who would be trying to use these concepts, quickly advanced to the name Babbitt Brighton, thought of the product line that would give him the money, and then instantly linked in the "Luxury" theme with the "Ozymiranda" framework, and the colorless chap who would meet Ozzy the witch became fantastically rich Babbitt Brighton, and I thought of innumerable tales strung together on this glittering bead-strand of characterization. Babbitt Brighton (and his money and Ozzy's powers) can get stoned and think of the ideas that I think of; Babbitt Brighton can [and Bob Grossman came up with Babbitt Redux] try the glossopharyngal nerve operation, can travel to the future, can look forward to the Tell-Manhattan Library, and can program the computer that blows up into "Live" when I rework the story "All/One."
DIARY 90267
12/4/77
DREAM/PLOT/THEORY/LINK COMPLEX
Woke during the night with one dream vivid in memory: I'm in a kitchen that looks somewhat like Dennis's on the inside. Hanging in a planter in the window --- rather, an oddly shaped plant HAD been in a planter in the window, and the planter had either been taken away or broken, yet the plant remained, entwined with the planter hangers, supplying itself with water in a pattern of moisture reminiscent of the pattern of ants on the walls in "It Happened at Lake Wood Manor." We studied the strange water supply from the inside [DETAILED DIAGRAMS], but I found it was better to go out the door and examine the structure of the plant from the outside, when it touched the ground, the water source. There, I could lift various fronds and actually trace the MACRO-CAPILLARY flow of the water along this trunk, between these leaves (which were rather like large lipstick-plant leaves), onto a branch, under another frond, gradually but coherently moving upward until it hit the main mass of the plant, where it branched out to supply the entire plant with water, even though there were no ROOTS, only leaves and branches which weren't even CONNECTED, except by the vertical streams of water. There was no ACTUAL consideration of CAUSE, but I remember smiling and feeling good about the idea that it would be called "The Zolnerzak Effect" after the person who discovered it. There was no doubt but that it was an entirely new method that ANY plant could adapt, under the proper circumstances and arrangements of branches, to supply itself with water without roots. Pissed and went back to sleep. Before waking in the morning at 7:45, bleary with sleepiness, stuffed with food from last night, vaguely hung over from quantities of champagne, amaretto, and anisette, I had a second dream. About three or four of us were rehearsing a play in a building somewhere in California, probably San Diego, since it's been on my mind. Both the time of the play AND the time of the rehearsal were sometime in the future, the play itself vaguely science-fictional. It concerned a group of people connected in some sort of study, and I sat as a sort of director-critic in the auditorium as the rehearsal neared the end of the play. From various doors in the auditorium came small groups of three or four men, mainly taken from the waiter staff at the banquet at Foffe's last night, but in addition each was a locally famous actor with a particular small following, and each was playing the part of a scientist in the play, contributing to some unified theory, and the IMPACT of these people, who had been in earlier acts and were now coming on together as a sort of character-reprise, was pleasing to everyone concerned, as was the impact of the characters gathering IN THE PLAY, and we were content that the rehearsal produced the desired effect. Some of the men were leaders of small groups of researchers, some were the proctors of dormitories where the researchers lived (could this have come somehow from "When Worlds Collide"?), and others were independent investigators who had joined forces with the group in their researches. The particular plot device had to do with electing some sort of chairman, and I was chatting with someone sitting at a typewriter-teletype console stage front, with his back to the audience, and observed, "The fellow in the red sweater, who is he?" "He's president of the Bulla Residence," said the teletypist, who then took his part in the play by typing rapidly on the console, as if he were transmitting a message to another group of people similarly gathered for the election. I was pleased that it (the rehearsal) was going so well, and turned to talk with someone beside me when the whole building began to shake slightly. I kept quiet as long as I could, then questioned the fellow at my side, "Earthquake?" He nodded slightly, and I reviewed the building we were in: a self-contained auditorium suspended from an elliptical frame attached by an enormous L-brace to the steep slope of a hill overlooking the Pacific. As the tremors increased, it was obvious that the building was going to break loose and toboggan into the Pacific, and I searched for a soft place, a sofa, along the leading wall where I would be protected from the impact of the building into the water, like a ship being launched, but I was mostly concerned about all the furniture and people who would be tumbling from the other, trailing edge, of the auditorium on TOP of me, and I reviewed the statement of the architect of the building in my memory: "If an earthquake hits, there'll be plenty of time to contemplate the end as it falls toward the ocean." As I woke, in a confused sleep-wake state, I wondered if the building would smash to pieces, killing everybody, or what the chances would be that it would convert into a waterproof submarine which would slide off the continental shelf and explore the depths of the Pacific by means of some as-yet unrealized motive power hidden in the rear of the building itself. I reviewed both dreams, wanting to remember them, while waiting for Dennis to wake. At that point, I started thinking about the teletype console in the dream-rehearsal, wondering how it could be made convincingly futuristic, and, without seeming preparation, based on prior knowledge that present computers are limited in speed by the actual time it takes for electrons to transmit bits of information through the length of the wires, even though the transmission is at the speed of light, I thought it would be an advance of some significance if each wiring terminal that PREVIOUSLY needed a physical wire connecting it to the next terminal would contain a molecular WIRELESS TRANSMITTER, sending information bits INSTANTANEOUSLY to the next component or components, outmoding inter-component wiring just as wireless obsoleted the Transatlantic Cable. NOW, while typing, it seems that the BETTER analogy would be: as COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITES obsoleted earthbound transmitters by sending a signal a far greater distance, while BECAUSE of the greater distance, overcoming the limitations imposed by the curvature of the earth in line-of-sight transmissions of microwaves. I reviewed the possible mechanism of these terminal-transmitters, and I figured that it would have to be an ELEMENTARY property of elements, so that literally ONE activated molecule would suffice. I needed enormous numbers of DISCRETE quantities, so that would seem to rule out molecular WEIGHT, as those didn't supply enough "different numbers" (a terminal could be comprised of ONE carbon atom or TWO carbon atoms, but that would permit only two "different numbers"). I thought of electron-states, but those being somewhat limited, about 2-3 dozen, were too convenient for the information-bit content to be TRANSMITTED --- the message --- so I had to look elsewhere for the MEDIUM. That left only the vibrational frequency of the nucleus itself, and because not much is known about that, except that it DOES very minutely, equivalent to electron energy states, and could probably be postulated to vary DISCRETELY, as electron states do. Since carbon has only 4 electrons, each having about 6 easily produced states, this would produce 24 information bits: 10 digits and 14 codes. But each carbon has 12 nucleons, 6 protons (atomic number) and 6 neutrons (atomic weight of 12), they would probably be able to interact AMONG themselves at least 12 times, which only leads to 144 states, but since wiring diagrams NOW are usually limited to 24 or 48 physical WIRES from a chip, this would be a sextupling or tripling of capability, and the limited RANGE of transmission would enable ANOTHER transmitter BEYOND the range to use the same frequencies without confusion. But I didn't think of THOSE numbers when I thought of the WIRELESS TRANSMITTERS, I DID think of frequency generators similar to the timing impulses in LED watches (which I'll have to check in the SciAm wiring diagrams for details): THESE have specific frequencies without which the watches couldn't be accurate, and the transmitting of the information would be EXACTLY equivalent to pressing the button to transmit the TIME to the EYE. THEN, seemingly without link, came the idea that the THEORY might be better explained by exploiting the idea of hyper-dimensions that ACTUALLY connect these "wireless terminals," only in other dimensions, and it occurs to me that this might be ANOTHER fame-making idea for Babbitt Brighton in "Throwback": he uses these dimensions to revolutionize data transmission in computers, producing not so much a new generation as a new FAMILY of computers. Now I had to find the physical basis for the theory, and came up with the idea of the discreteness of the frequencies being SO exact that, at SOME time interval, short or long, the frequencies would be INTEGRAL, and these INTEGRAL frequencies would be FACTORS of the integral speed of light! Rapidly then I could postulate a limited number of FACTORS of the enormous integral-number speed-of-light frequency, and these factors would be WINDOWS, analogous to WINDOWS in astronomy that permit the easier passage of light rays, analogous to TUNNEL FREQUENCIES in atomic physics so that "strange" particles can "appear" outside the potential well without "climbing over the rim." So all Babbitt has to do is play with the numbers until he finds the INTEGRAL-number speed-of-light frequency, finds the factors of that number, licenses them --- and then I wonder how MANY scientific anomalies these windows might "explain": in addition to the astronomy windows, the tunnel frequencies, they could explain computer malfunctions when certain components reach the window frequency (and forgot the console error-detecting machine which is comprised of a LIKE computer and a COMPARATOR computed which could be used to FIND these error frequencies for Babbitt), explain "Close Encounters" when the inter-dimensional ships hit a window frequency and --- now while typing --- explain the transition to death THROUGH these window frequencies! Anyway, I'm lying in bed going through all these things, tracing back my thought patterns, and find that these WINDOW FREQUENCIES were actually prefigured in the DREAM about the water supply to the PLANTS, so that my thoughts, hardly wandering outward, described a circle in the space of an hour or so and came BACK to apply to a DREAM that I'd had in the beginning of the cycle.
DIARY 13055
6/8/78
FEELING GOD
That was the typo on DIARY 13050, and since "Serpent Power" was talking of feeling that God dwelled in the union of Shakti from the Kundalini rising from the lowest Chakra to copulate with Shiva at the top of the head, once again producing the undifferentiated unity from which all illusion springs; since "Tibetan Book of the Dead" talked of the soul as the Collective Unconscious that knows it's all there is to IS; since Ouspensky's "New Model of the Universe" was talking of the Superman who would become an unknown god in our midst after we launched him into being; and since Actualism seemed to be pushing Him/Me onto me, and since I was having a crisis on FEELING in general (see DIARY 13054), it seemed worth exploring. I have a resistance to feeling emotions in general, feeling sensations in my body in particular, so there are levels of the resistance I have against even the POSSIBILITY of feeling that I'm god. And seeming to avoid lightwork-bodywork doesn't seem to be helping. And ignoring my body by being too plump, too unmuscular, too tooth-conscious, too large-pored, doesn't help the moment of impending death, at which point all the PRACTICE of attaining Samadhi (and Joan Ann said, to add to DIARY 13048, seriously, that the Indian religion GOT you there but then "so what" and didn't bother to earth it. But the point is to PRACTICE it so that you can do it AT THE MOMENT OF DEATH is what the "Book of the Dead" says) resolves to the APPLICATION of attaining Samadhi at death, so that you can be translated into Nirvana to get AWAY from birth, and not be reborn again. But God WANTS to be reborn again because he IS being reborn again, and as long as there are people around (unless New York gets awful, see DIARY 13056 --- this is very complicated with so many pages in front of me!) I want to be around to enjoy them --- and as part of my ploy as attention-getter, if I can't be Adam, I can AT LEAST be Omega Man, and one of my fantasies of the USE of my diaries, now that I talk this way (if I could talk THAT way --- ) is in the RECONSTRUCTION --- AHA!!! the REINCARNATION!!! OF THE EARTH AND ITS CIVILIZATION IN CASE IT EVER GOT DESTROYED. If GOD chose to stop being REBORN, I SINGLE HANDEDLY would keep it going, which is what all the tantras say ANYWAY: AS long as ONE person wants to be reborn, the whole THING keeps coming back: and then SURPRISE: you're the last to be Nirvanaed, you're the solitary object of our pro-affection (protection/affection), and then I start the wheel.
DIARY 13086
6/16/78
THOUGHTS (PROLIFERATING) AS CANCER (MENTAL)
Lay abed, having just recorded the SPATE of detail about the dreams to type up later (see DIARY 13087), and then I think of the DOZENS of things I have to do today and currently, then think of the trips I want to take, the things I want to do in the future, stories to write, people to send letters to, places I've been, Actualism advancement and bodywork and sessions, and I recall the "hose" that could sweep out my brain of thoughts and consign them all to the consuming fires, and the QUANTITY of thoughts are so enormous, and the variety and current SPLASH of the FLOW are so overwhelming that I am forced (again, I think) to consider them as some sort of spontaneously, uninterruptedly, uncontrollably proliferating mental CANCER: normal thoughts like normal cells are nice and controllable and very useful; but these abnormal thoughts are the opposite of useful: they paralyze any actions until they're cleared away, like garbage with an earthmoving machine, and disposed of so that the mind can function in an ordinary way. Like the fluorescence of cancer, there's a certain attraction in its abundance, like decaying material there's a charm in the rank odors and garish rainbows of color, but for any CREATIVITY it's garbage. Last night I sat down, one-pointedly, and typed out the ideas I had for Gretchen Cryer (what chutzpah!). If I'd done the same for the letter to Meredith and letters to people and tasks around the apartment (so that dishes wouldn't be TOTALLY dirty, making me think that I'll have to wash TWO sessions of them to get them all dry without breakage --- and if I'd caught up with the diary as opposed to being about 20 pages behind as I am now, with lots of Actualism sessions still to be sorted out and written about) things wouldn't be so bad. But they are. So I type this "unnecessary" page (I AGAIN think of the "DIARY pages as engrams" idea which I know I've written before), postponing even the BASIC duties of typing the dream from last night, washing the lotion off my face, putting on breakfast hamburger, doing lightwork, and getting to the other tasks of the day so that I can get indexes out of the way so I can get to rest of things on list so I can get to WRITING, and it seems almost a hopeless task.
DIARY 13141
7/3/78
GIVING BIRTH VERSUS REINCARNATION
I remember, as part of the though-whirl (see DIARY 13139) that I'd been so taken up with the idea of being a FATHER after LSD, continuing some part of me BIOLOGICALLY down through the years. Then I think of the story of Existential Being (see DIARY 13139) who ACTUALLY lives through all the years. Now reincarnation seems to be coming in stronger and stronger and this is a way of SPIRITUALLY living through more than one life span. And I suppose somewhere there's the MYSTICAL thought that all time exists, somehow, now, so that MYSTICALLY ONE CAN ACCESS ALL LIFE SPANS, IF ONE KNOWS HOW, IN THE PRESENT MOMENT. And then reading and writing are ways of METAPHORICALLY living many lives from the past and transmitting MY life to the FUTURE. But the core thought was that the REINCARNATIONAL lives are certainly closer to "me" than the BIOLOGICAL lives, since in the reincarnation there's actually "more" of me than there would be in the sperm-cell genetic content that goes to make up offspring in a biological sense. And the idea of having "children in thought" who became "part of me" or "like me" (in the sense of being similar to me) or "like me" (in the sense of loving me) in a fuller sense than a biological child could do. Dennis brings up the poignant topic of "What do you do when you don't LIKE your kids?" as his brother doesn't like his snotty daughter, and as "Bogotá: one day" brought up when the Gamines fled from beating fathers and helpless mothers. Of course one need NOT like his reincarnational reflections, but at least that's HIM, HIMSELF, that he's not liking, rather than not liking someone whom SOCIETY has decreed should "carry on the family name" (which is surely a lot weaker than carrying on the thought or the "spirit" of a person) and "get what you didn't get" and "be happier than you were," which is only society's way of making sure society continues the way IT wants to be: conservative, secure, controlling, rather than saying "Well, your kids can do as they wish, even if it means revolution and a completely different way of life (as Jan-Michael Vincent, to a good screenplay by Tracy Keenan Wynn, in "Tribes," brought to the Marines, who couldn't understand not-killing and inner-tranquility for a SECOND). So rather than "getting" biological children, maybe I'm moving to "accept" mystical children of reincarnation!
DIARY 13194
7/16/78
IDEAS FOR "EVOLVING" CARTOON SEQUENCES
1) Cells dividing into organisms that produce cells that divide into organisms.
2) Sperm that creates a man-child that grows to a man producing sperm that ...
3) Animation Festival-like: child draws world, out to world, back to child.
4) Penis grows from stimulation of penis pictures stimulated by penises.
5) Flower into seed into planting into germinating into flower.
6) Clouds into rain into rivers into evaporation into clouds into rain ...
7) Body cells into grave into grain into cows into body into body cells into grave ...
8) Cake-tree: cake into stomach into bloodstream into capillaries into body shape.
9) Book turning into ideas turning into writing turning into books turning into ...
10) Tree burnt to ashes fertilizing crops turning into food into man into grave into tree
11) Allegro-Non-Troppo-like: dirt into blob into creature into man into degenerate into blob into dirt
12) Black hole into white hole into Cosmic Egg into Universe, collapses to black hole ...
13) Man sucking himself getting enlightened and into Nirvana as man sucking himself.
14) Steinberg and Esher: hands drawing themselves drawing their pencil points and lines.
15) Blast of rocket into takeoff into space flight into re-entry into rocket explosion.
16) Spaceship going faster than light and returning to pad before it takes off.
17) 1-D man setting off online and returning to start by going around circle.
18) 2-D man setting off across plane and returning to start by going around sphere.
19) 3-D man setting off across space and returning to start by going around hyper-space.
20) 4-D man setting off across hyperspace and returning to start by going around 5-space.
21) Exfoliative generalizations of N-D man returning from N-D space, back to POINT.
22) Time circling through eons to return to the time from which it started.
23) Visualization of Hindu kalpas and ages and stages of man as breath of Brahma.
24) Fruit eaten and seed growing into tree producing fruit which is eaten ...
25) Sentences which repeat "Sentences which repeat "Sentences which repeat "Sentences which
26) Mirrors mirroring mirrors mirroring mirrors mirroring mirrors mirroring mirrors mirro
27) Magnifying molecules turns them into universes, which when ITS molecules are magnified, turn into universes
28) Finding our galaxy as a molecule in a hypergalaxy which is a molecule in a hyperhyper
29) Sound patterns that enclose meaningful messages, each sound of which contains message
30) Indra's net: spheres mirroring spheres, like displaying Guggenheim's basement-in VENICE
31) Lists like this that make cartoons that produce lists that make cartoons that produce
32) Computers printing out plans for improved computers that print out plans for improved
33) Breathing that produces total-dimensional reality that produces breathing that produce [purposely left unfinished]
DIARY 13206
7/18/78
OLD FANTASY UPDATED
I THINK there's a page somewhere about a stoned Idea that I had (that merits a capital letter, I guess) that, with all the things I sent out and a goodly number that never came back, I am ALREADY a famous writer, but the world has united to keep me unaware of it, knowing that if my success became known to me, my style would change in unknown ways, so they want to keep me unspoiled. This is particularly amusing since I look at the media at random, and the idea that I would NOT have heard about me and my fame is funny (thought they could have me on the Johnny Carson show and write about me in the weekly Times, since I never watch or read THOSE particular media-items), but thinking about it NOW leads me to the equally farfetched idea that seems to be TRUE: that I'm actually GOD but I'M succeeding in hiding it from myself. All the subterfuges that would be needed to keep my fame from me (no books of mine in bookstores I go to, no ads in papers that I read) could be used to keep MY godhood from me: no glimpses of new and unheard-of means of communication, no glimpses of eternity, no reading of someone else's mind to find that I DO know what they're thinking, no miracles of loaves or walking dead or boiling water freezing or apples falling upward. No eidetic memory or recall of prenatal experiences or remembrance of lives past. And in the same way the plot to keep me from the knowledge of myself as a famous writer is fantastically successful, so all the books I read and friends I meet are marvelously adept at keeping my godhead from me, even Bruce, so wackily adamant about Actualism that he becomes someone to laugh at rather than to be grateful to. And I hope that I know I'm not schizophrenic or paranoid enough to actually believe this, but it COULD be used as part of "Babbitt Brighton," so I guess I should renumber the page, or at least indicate that BB should be participating in the ideas listed here, except that it would have to be done with some LACK of seriousness, which would make it all the more serious since than it could BE thought to be a serious joke, rather than a jesting reality, whatever that means, but I'm at the bottom of the page and I can quit rambling on and on.
DIARY 92079
10/3/78
PRIMITIVE ASPECTS OF BEING THROWN BACK
Fascinated with the idea that Actualism builds up this remarkable structure through the lessons, which they talk about, which we talk about, which we begin to see evidence of, but it's ALL IN THE POWER OF OUR MINDS, and part of the final initiation is to be TOLD that we've made up the whole thing. It's one thing being told that we made up the world, since we can't remember a time when the world wasn't or what it would be like WITHOUT the world, though we CAN remember what it was like without these egos and power rays and energies, and know what it's like without them NOW, and so we'd HAVE to admit that we have ENORMOUS power, and if the REVELATION were done in a striking enough way, it MIGHT be forceful enough to BLAST the realization that we create it ALL into our reluctant beings. So Babbitt Brighton could be subjected to this "traditional psychoanalysis" from the very beginning, talking about it so matter-of-factly that the READER is certain that he's on solid ground, and then THAT'S shown to be only a trick --- or that the whole HOSPITAL is a trick, or that both are TRICKS IN TURN, so the READER can sympathize with part of the shock that Babbitt has to experience. And then he could regress to a part of the psyche that WE would think is primitive, like the prehistoric earth-mother rituals of death of the king to fertilize the fields for new life, so that the "throwback" is back a COUPLE of layers of advance, so that my idea that man HAS DEMONSTRABLY EVOLVED through the RECORDED millennia can be brought forward. We DON'T believe in such myths, DON'T follow such rituals, DON'T think in such ways, so our mind has IN FACT evolved beyond the point where these would impress us, where these would have power over us. Hinting that in the future there would be MORE effective psychologies and therapies that would be powerful THEN, and even THESE would be seen as throwbacks for the evolved minds that would have come about be means of learning to deal with, make common, live with, assimilate as foundation for the next layer, what comes to us in the present. Then with something additional from outer space, it could be made a cosmic throwback, which we would be compared to a far-advanced EXTRATERRESTRIAL civilization.
