Ω{Hitchiking south on US101 from Salinas in 1979 I got picked up by a woman driving a 68 T-bird. She was very tall, very very thin, ill looking, with black hair that might have been a wig, she had a cosmetic box, a makeup kit, one of those little suitcase-like things, powder blue, it was filled with pill bottles, most of them had her name on them. Her name, what she said her name was, what the Kerr-McGee ID she showed me when I didn't believe her said, was Karen Silkwood, she showed me a driver's license with a Las Vegas address on it. I was on my way to San Luis Obispo, to take part in an anti-nuclear protest, Diablo Canyon, a PG&E power plant, was not yet commissioned and there was still alot of organized resistance to it. It was a two hour ride, 24 years ago, I don't remember a lot about it, the details I do have are the result of one those shocked remembrances, moments of horror when images and dialogues resurfac after being buried, kept away from my conscious mind. I'm not writing this to gain any sympathy or understanding or support. I'm through with all that. No one has anything I want now, and there's nothing I can see to be gained by a shift in the dynamic as it now stands. Whoever it was that did that is still here, whether it was God or the government or some private security hit. And they won't just roll over if the truth is made unavoidably plain. Maybe it's having The Karen Silkwood Story on the TV at the same time as Three Days of The Condor. Maybe it's too much coffee this morning. There is a satisfaction that comes when I've written something I know to be true, though it's tempered by the probability of some blindside reaction being almost inevitable. There was much much more than a strange encounter in a car.
It gets religious in some ways, but ugly ways, nothing pure, the light is profane but so intense it can pass for glory. One technical detail I think is important, there's two or three major events, crimes, failures, whatever you want to think of them as, that make these things somehow appropriate in the eyes of the few people who are actually willing to concede their validity. Or in plainer English, after I manage to slog through the initial resistance to the fantastic nature of this weird stuff, the next layer is all about people saying well of course they were messing with your head, you deserved it. And it goes back just like that step by step into the blur and fog of my younger, more easily re-documented history.
Things were like this BEFORE the events that seem to justify this, I have a real difficult time explaining that without recourse to the paranormal. Something else was going on, but my credibility, my ability itself was compromised so effectively in the crucial time, when it was still possible to change all this, I was mute at best and mostly delirious and poisoned, full of intense gibberish and strange convoluted half-thoughts. So what this online thing has been for me is a chance to demonstrate one thing, and one thing only. That the remnant of my abilities is enough to demonstrate, if you have the willingness and the open mind, that what I showed every sign of becoming was threatening beyond tolerance to something that seeks to control this world. because now there's some wieight behind my saying that I was articulate and intelligent and absolutely unwilling to compromise. That I showed every sign of being able to speak subversive truth.
Around the same time, maybe a year earlier, I had an encounter that blew the lid off the illusion that I wasn't being heard in those late night rants I used to make at the local high school, out on the landing by the drama department. I'd get high and take my guitar, sneak through the fence, get up on the littel platform at the back of the school and let it all out. But you need to understand that was all residual after the break, after the takedown after most of what I could have become was gone forever. I was seriously damaged, trying to heal, and getting smacked down every time I turned around. So I read in my mom's old medical dictionary, a thick green book published in the early decades of the century, a diagnosis for someone who adopted the dress and mannerisms of those much younger, hebephrenia. I was 30 doing a lot of coke, smoking Thai sticks and raving like a lunatic with a guitar in modal tuning, when I wasn't sleeping on my mother's floor, so it hit home a little, was I a man or a boy, was I pretending to be a teenager or was I just being real? I went off on that, one night doing my mad oratory and squawk from the little perch in the back of the high school, alone and mad and with nothing to lose. The next day in a kind of polar-reverse I was back at the school, running around the track after the schoolday was done, it was the early days of the fitness revolution and a lot of people were wearing their first pairs of Nikes and 'jogging' around local tracks. I also sat in the sun and played the guitar a little. This guy approached me, wearing a horrible shirt made out of blue and red bandannas, which was a reference to a shirt of mine I'd had stripped away from me, that my love had made out of boy scout scarves, though I didn't put that together until later. This guy came up and injected himself into my immediate space, strange energy intense aggressive arrogant. At some point he started talking about "Hebe"s. It took a little bit, for one thing because I was very much living in more than one reality, and the boundaries between them were strong. But eventually I got it. We talked actually a little I think I must have made some conciliatory enough noise, he then became sort of excessively friendly following me around the school yard, and up into the stands overlooking the track. I told him to leave me alone, he wouldn't, he was all about communicating and belonging and all, I went down the steps and onto the field and across toward the gym, he followed me the whole time, I repeatedly told him to leave me alone. Finally by the gym I turned and told him I'd kill him if he didn't go away; he started to do the same ingratiating dance he'd been following me with for awhile and I smashed the guitar against the pavement and went at him with the neck of it held like a club above my head. He left.}