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November 3, 2007Rrrrripped from Today’s Headlines…
Supervisor Bevan Dufty Fails in Bid for Title of World’s Biggest Killjoy, Instead Creates Greatest Party Atmosphere City Has SeenDateline: San Francisco, CA November 1, 2007 SUPERVISOR BEVAN DUFTY,dressed up, or down, as a Killjoy for Halloween 2007 in the Castro, according to the San Francisco Chronicle this date, “walked through the area Wednesday night, his only costume a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead.”The ceremonial Walk of Shame. I never made it to the Castro, but I understand from an unreliable source (myself) that by the end of the night the street was covered with graffiti of him peering over a fence spying on the good time the rest of the world was having, reading “Killjoy Was Here.” I made that up. Actually, I’m walking that walk today at the Café, still dolled up at 9:45 a.m., though admittedly worse for wear, in my biennial Halloween ensemble, the King of the Cats, from the Stephen Vincent Benét story of the same name, about the conductor who’s all the craze, for conducting with his…tail. Naturally, I wore my tails. I had no official plans except to check out whatever scene, including empty streets, was happening at the Castro. If dead there, I was going to “walk the earth,” as Samuel L. Jackson put it in “Pulp Fiction.” My motto for the night was, “My only obligation is to see.” You can’t go wrong. “I’M CALLING IN HALLOWEEN”I normally (well, if I do anything normally) work every other Thursday at my little eight-hour-a-month job. But I realize that this Thursday is the day after Halloween, which I would declare a national holiday had I the power to do so, so I phoned my boss and said “I’m calling in Halloween.” She let me off the hook once for a writing emergency (“I’m on a roll, can I come in tomorrow instead?”) so I figured she’d be sympathetic. Who knows what the evening will hold, or what condition my condition will be in on the morrow. AH, MY BEST FRIEND!I take my dinner salad over to a friend’s office to see if anything’s shaking for the evening. Nothing except aftershocks from the earthquake. He couldn’t quite commit to “partying” that evening, so I tell him I’m going to go home and change and come back with Halloween treats and he could take it from there.“Ah, my best friend!” I’m thinking as I reach for the top shelf at good ol’ O’Looney’s, my neighborhood not-quite-corner store, where I score my wine and discuss world conditions with young Muhammad or his father the senior Muhammad. “This is Mr. O’Looney,” I say to my friends of whichever of the Palestinian pair is behind the counter. Sometimes they’re out of the $9.49 1.5 liter bottle of my house wine, René Junot “|Dry Red Table Wine,” and I was glad to see it in its place. “JU KNOW?”I always tell guests, “this modest French ruby red culled from Syrah, Grenache Noir and Carignan grapes of the Languedoc-Roussillon, is pretty damn good for the price. Exhibiting delicate aromas of fresh cherries and raspberries, luxurious notes of cinnamon and, upon the spicy finish, pepper,” it is good enough for my non-discriminating table, anyway. From painting my hair black to pouring myself into my bustier it takes me about two hours to compose my ensemble for the evening, because my hands keep shaking and I can’t get the whiskers right. So when I finally get back to the office with my paper bag of wine and appetizers, I find a drawn and padlocked grate. Bummer. It’s not even 8:00—early dawn on Halloween. Here I am all dressed up…and well, it’s Halloween in San Francisco! Everything works. Anyway I return home for the “bloom.” That’s what I call the “settling in” period after I first ingest that miracle of God’s bounty Psilocybe cyanescens. First I shuffle the vegetative materia around in my mouth with the Junot, the perfect mellow non-bitter potion to swish ‘round and ‘round to soften the mass into the chewy cud I need to be able to stomach the stuff. The taste, though earthy, is nostalgic. OK SO I’M HIGHon mushrooms washed down with wine. Sue me. This whole column is written under the influence. And though my shrink would certainly frown upon it, on top of the Strattera, Trazodone, Bupropion (Wellbutrin), Abilfy and something else, uh, Fluoxetine (Prozac) and occasionally Clonazepam (Klonopin—I prefer Xanax) I take on a daily and/or nightly basis, much less alcohol, pot, Special K or whatever substance I might indulge in, I LOVE PSYCHEDELICS.But wince all you want, Dr. S., they are not the distracting escape valve I used wine for in my intolerable last days as a Berkeley landlord, when I would specifically and with self-knowledge get home from work and drink up a bottle to escape being a Berkeley landlord. I would get home, pop a cork, and, taking care to raise my soft palette, sing at the top of my lungs and pound the piano along with opera classics, una furtiva lagrima, say, or, yes, Judy Garland, the night is bitter, the stars have lost their glitter, and all because of the man that got awaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.” That was back when my property (a fourplex apartment building and my private residence, a neighboring 1+ BR cottage) was on the market and after six years I couldn’t wait to get outta there. I was standing on the second story porch when a tenant told me he’d slipped on the newly painted stairs, when I’d assumed the painter had used some sort of outdoor abrasive floor paint (no), and I searched the sky and pleaded, God, get me outta here. I had also inspected someone’s much-neglected toilet and thought, “I don’t want to own that.” AAAAAH, ’SHROOMSThey, on the other hand, are my drop-the-scales-from-my-eyes friend. They are the world’s most natural high, straight from the earth to you. The rainy season! We waited for it, we prayed for it, we let it rain, rain, rain for weeks, we let the ground get soaked before we headed out to the Oregon cow patty meadows to eat ‘shrooms right out of the ground and amass our Halloween stash. Wet knees, Oregon mist in my face, the taste of fresh-from-the-earth psilocybin-laced vegetative matter, wow, that was L-I-V-I-N ’. “The older you get,” says Matthew McConaughey in “Dazed and Confused,” “the more rules they are going to try and get you to follow. You just gotta keep on livin’, man. L-I-V-I-N ‘.” Now the ‘shrooms I picked in the Pacific Northwest were nothing like the one magic musher I stumbled upon in Golden Gate Park, so I don’t know what variety of Psilocybe they were—be they cubensis, cyanescens, fimetaria
heimii, hispanica,
hoogshagenii, liniformans var. americana, mexicana, Montana, natalensis,
pelliculosa, portoricensis,
quebecensis, samuiensis, sanctorum, semilanceata, sierrae,
silvatica, stuntzii, Squamosa, subaeruginosa, subcubensis, subviscida, tampanensis, uxpanapensis, weilii, xalapensis, or zapotecorum [I just threw all that stuff in there to impress reader/mycologist Doug M.]—but I caution you against going to GGP and picking and eating whatever mushroom you run across without a knowledgeable guide/mycologist by your side. Do tons of research, carry a handbook, know your poisons and get referrals from trusted friends, not street people. BOSS OF YOUR OWN BRAINIt’s not for everyone. I’m not trying to be or not be a role model. Like Hunter S. Thompson, I am not suggesting anyone do, try or not do drugs of any kind; it just works for me. This is my column about my life as I live it. Sue me. You’re on your own. Coincidentally, perhaps ironically, I am flaunting my love of the ‘shroom just as the psilocybin has hit the fan in the Netherlands, which just banned the sale of dried magic mushrooms due to some high-profile unfortunate incident involving a young tourist who jumped off a bridge (“smiling” if I heard right). As with any legal or illegal drug, you take it at your own risk, of course. You eat food at risk of allergens and poisoning, too. It seems far weirder to take into your body a chunk of dead animal you don’t even know the origin of. And the Dutch people are pissed off! Hands off our ‘shrooms! ‘SHROOMS ARE NATURE’S WAYof tapping me on the shoulder and releasing the unbearability of being for the unbearable lightness of being…I’ve heard that Himalayan monks’ ordinary perception is like that of the average Joe’s on LSD—because they have reached a level of being where they are not in need of filtering out the details of the surrounding world that would overwhelm the rest of us mortals. Their only obligation is to see. Beauty, splendour, ugliness, squalor, bliss, suffering, the whole shebang—no judgments. That’s what I saw last night, mile after mile, hour after hour. I expected nothing, needed nothing, had everything. In fact, a friend’s remarking on my Salvador Dalí shirt reminded me of a passage from my axfiles account of a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibit where I fell in love with the “Geodesic Portrait of Gala.” “Gala’s jacket itself was on display in a glass case, radiating the aura of a past time deeply lived. I felt as if were seeing the painting through LSD-enhanced eyes—but this means only that I was really seeing. If we really looked and really saw, we wouldn’t need mind-altering drugs. Our minds have already been altered, away from the natural and spiritual beauty of the world, corrupted and exploited by man. (What movie: The most beautiful thing in the world is of course the world itself.) It’s all right out there under our noses. Bite into it.” BURNING MAN, THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE PUBLICATION OF ON THE ROADand the ‘shroom connection I made at Temple Bar, seem to be the holy triumvirate—sorry, OK, the trifecta—I required to get me out of the three-dimensional monolithic writer’s block/life slump I’d been in. Nothing interested me, and as I remarked to a friend, it’s one of the hallmarks of depression to berate yourself for feeling like shit when your own suffering compared to that of the world’s is pretty damn miniscule, at the same time berating yourself for blaming yourself for being a depressive—and the cherry on the upsidedown cake is that the whole masturbatory, fucked-up, wrapped-up-in-yourself routine can prevent you from the engagement with that outside world your sanity so needs for perspective. And there you have it. The Joy of Depression. AND THEN CAME HALLOWEENThis party’s dead? Whoever you are that thinks you can kill Halloween in San Francisco, you are the one who’s dead. I understand Supervisor Dufty was home by 10:00 watching a “Cheers” rerun. I made that up. Well, I was at home, “blooming,” and admiring myself in the full-length mirror, this fabulous manifestation of myself as the King of the Cats, all dressed up and ready for, what? Well, for the regular ol’ Halloween ruckus just then coming down Page Street—drums, whistles, yelping—the party had come to pick me up and I was ready to roll. I grabbed my evening purse and my keys and slammed all the doors on the way out, my cut-away tails flying behind me, nearly tripping down the stairs in my rush on my a-little-too-long velvet pants. It was a regular band of merry pranksters intent of having Halloween, if you please. We went all over the place, I couldn’t even trace our route, but people everywhere were leaning out of windows and cars checking it out and signaling approval. I was 1000% primed and into it, dancing, yahooing, gyrating in front of cop cars, screaming at the waiting traffic, “Here comes Halloween!” There was a ringleader with a whistle who directed traffic and more or less kept the ever-shifting crowd coalesced. I GUESS THIS IS THE PARTY?people are saying. Is this the party? I guess, I don’t know, is it? It is what it is, that’s what it is. If you’ve got a drum beat, you’ve got a party. I am suffocating with joy that San FranSASSY! has pulled it together without the help of the blowhards, in spite of the blowhards, in fact because of the blowhards this was evolving into the best party ever and I found I had to THANK the blowhards because Halloween, just like they said, is too big to be contained by the Castro. There is one particularly interesting face in the crowd, who keeps turning up at regular intervals as I dance along the parade route. He’s dressed like a 19th century gentleman with a bowler hat, and suddenly I have a face for Anne Rice’s “Lasher,” the dashing demon of the Mayfair clan. We all seem to collapse by consensus at Dolores Park. There’s a bit of confusion about what’s happening to “the party.” Is this a breather and will it go on from here? Who knows? Someone takes up a guitar and I keep dancing. The gentleman tells me he had been on his way home and got swept up by the parade. I tell him I’m guaranteed a party wherever I go because my only obligation is to see. I show him what a beautiful still life is created by my house keys, with several heart charms dangling from them, nestled in my palm and framed by my silver rings. It is truly beautiful. They look like the crown jewels.As I step off by myself onto the lawn and lose my breath at the sweep of light from oncoming cars moving over the landscape, I see some cops exit their vehicle (cop talk for getting out of their car) and move onto the sidewalk to herd people out of there. Really, we were just a crowd of folks sitting on the stairs relaxing and hanging out. But we better move on before “something happens.” We reluctantly start to disperse. “DID WE JUST GET CORRALLED?”I address the crowd. “And are we indeed moving along now?” People start going their separate ways, factions breaking off, others lingering, some discussing what to do next. I head down Dolores, thinking I’d like to get a chance to say goodnight to the dapper gent, when, kismet, he walks up behind me and bids me farewell. But what is your name? Damien?! I’m Alexandra! Don’t we have beautiful names?You don’t even need all that makeup, I tell him, you are all-over beautiful, I find myself confessing, rapt by his gaze. And as he walked off under the trees into the vanishing perspective, a black silhouette with a with a halo of approaching headlights around him, I whispered, “Damien and Alexandra…Will I ever see you again?” It takes me about forever to get off of Dolores Street. Every tarnished brass door handle, every bark of every palm, every random gum wrapper on the street stops me in my tracks. My only obligation is to see. At one point a guy emerges out of the darkness and greets me—we’re under trees and I ask him, “Is that your front or your back I’m looking at?” My choice, I guess. He seems cheery and asks for a Halloween hug, but as I take a better look, my eyes bulge out—it was very definitely his front, and his very real dick bouncing in the breeze. OK, Good Night now, I say, retreating and declining the Halloween offer he makes as I back off. “I LOVE AN AUDIENCE,”he says.“Yeah, good luck with that.” I ogle Mission Dolores like it’s Xanadu, its history and mystery radiating into the night, stopping to lean on a police barricade and survey the scene for my next move. THE MISSION IS HOPPINGwith a capital H and that stands for Halloween. I move through the streets at a snail’s pace, barely advancing as I drink in the revelry, amazed by the spectacle of imagination and execution that is Halloween. I guess I just lucked out. Lucked into a passing party and the party landed me in the Mission. It was the place to be. I make my way to 16th and Valencia, which corner I can’t seem to leave. I find myself there a dozen times, passing over and over the same streets, but seeing a million different things each time, each more fascinating and captivating than the last, a sexy poster I seem to climb into, a pyramid of fake oranges, a gaggle of exotic shops I’ve never noticed before and their window displays I examine every detail of, while characters pour out of the bars, the Mission girls in all their whorish glittery get-ups stick out their butts and boobs before middle-aged men sitting in restaurant windows taking in the show. I have always avoided clumsy, goofy or uncomfortable costumes because this is my time to shine. My girlfriend once dressed as a dowdy housewife and spent the night dragging around in a flannel nightgown and shower cap full of rollers. I am out there to flaunt it and so are the girls. This is an instant “unplanned” carnival, a city party the City couldn’t have imagined—just a mess of people having fun with a capital F for Fuck You Blowhards. I AM BLOWN AWAYby the amount of human labor that has to have gone into all the objects before my eyes. A tiny stuffed toy mouse in a window–someone applied those whiskers and painted those eyes. A stocking on a mannequin–someone designed it, wove it, shipped it, received it, pulled it up the shapely leg. A candy bar in a rack–a team of people created the recipe, mixed the ingredients, printed the wrapper, packed it in a box, transported it to this convenience store where the counter clerk placed it on display. And on and on. Work drives the world. I keep asking myself, do I need water, food, a bathroom, to go home, to sleep–and no, I don’t need a damn thing. My only obligation is to see. I’m thinking, is the Mission my next incarnation? Why have I ended up here and why can I not seem to leave? The 22 bus comes along and I’m ready to get on it. I take it to Fillmore and Haight and am surprised to find the strip not that active, though Mythic Pizza is packed. Muhammad the Younger at O’Looney’s tells me it’s been pretty quiet. I tell him the Mission was wild. I notice the clock for the first time, it’s after 1:00—whatever that means. I’ve been out for four hours, or four lifetimes. I am overjoyed to be home with my cats having a meatball sandwich and back on my laptop. This has been the greatest night of my life. Thanks, Bevan. I’M IN THE ZONE! I’M BACK IN THE FUCKIN’ ZONE!I thought, when I quit my job, and essentially thumbed my nose at clock and calendar, that it would be a snap to live in The Zone. Not the twilight one, the one I enter when I “lift the grid” of civilized infrastructure and live in the realm of space and natural time (that thing that changes things as it passes). Read my archives if you don’t know what I’m talking about. But it’s freakin’ hard, man. This shit is ingrained. What time is it, what day is it, I’m meeting so-and-so at x o’clock on xday, have to put it on my calendar, for “Saturday, November 3rd 2007″ (a complete fabrication) and the whole of it. It would take me decades to find the letter I wrote decades ago to the first great love of my 20’s, Larry, about Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (the line “I am looking at your heart” is one of the most powerful in western literature) but Thomas Mann and Hans Castorp somehow have something to do with what I’m talking about right now (which was?) oh yes the passage of time which is what I mean by “natural time” as a property that has an effect on things, like the aging of people, that is noticeable over a span of the seasons, not as described by the passage of years on an arbitrary calendar. But I’m back in The Zone as I write, stroking the natural wonder of my beautiful cat Zazu’s luxurious tortie fur. The easiest way to find things is to look for something else. Didn’t I once write a paper called “Hans Castorp as Mythic Hero”? Whatev. GOD IS THAT WHICH CANNOT BE CONTAINEDThere is no vessel, no container, no universe that can contain God. God is that which cannot be contained. But you know what else cannot be contained? The human mind and its reach, which does not exceed its grasp. So you do the math, as they say, whoever they are. “God” is not the concept or reality or fantasy of an actual God, but the word we use to signify our experience and ideas of those things. A Container for That Which Cannot Be Contained. THIS COLUMNis the Container for that Thing which Cannot Be Contained—my mind. So when you read this column, you are looking into the entity that created it, my mind—but you can see only so much of that which cannot be contained by this column or anywhere else. LET’S SEE WHAT ALEXANDRA’S THINKING ABOUTOK, fair enough, she’s got a column, supposedly to say something “for whatever it’s worth” to the reader. But words fail her. SHE IS NOT HER MINDas Eckhard Tolle would say in The Power of Now. Words are the vehicle of the mind. Words define things, thereby limiting them from being something else. But our experience of things and environment is not so discrete, so segmented into this and that. Just as “table” is a shortcut for referencing our lifetimes of experience of flat structures we put things on, it does not describe any given table as distinguished from another, without further defining, narrowing, limiting the type of table it is. IN OTHERS WORDS,hold my hand. In other words, darling, kiss me. IN OTHER WORDSWords clarify and also obfuscate, by reducing any given thing to the meaning we ascribe to that word. Such is the writer’s paradox. Get it? I don’t blame you if you don’t, because it’s now 5:22 a.m. and my free-range ideas can’t be contained by the words in this column. They are failing me, or I am failing them, one or the other. The writer’s paradox is that the tools of their trade, words, by “naming” things that create a mental shortcut to the thing they represent (containers for the things contained), can go only so far, and in some ways limit the conveying of one’s experience that can’t be contained in words. SERVES HIM RIGHTNow my friend who locked up his office in my face (claims he didn’t know I was coming back) is suffering at 1:45 p.m. from a demon rum hangover. See, I told him, had he experienced the “’shroom bloom,” he’d be alert and raring to go. I have already clocked in 3800+ words since 1:30 a.m. this morning, and am back at the Café having a refreshing pint of Hoegaarden. I consider it a good omen for November that we both turned up at the Café in last night’s party gear—his a conservative suit for his disguise as a Mormon elder, mine the pupil-dilated king cat. Meowie Wowie! The author and her droopy ears, in her usual spot. ------------------------------------------------------------ Be there or beware
The Citizen Artist contributed this entire report to this report. Email her at copyright Alexandra Jones 2007 |
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