I came into my first big windfall when I was five years old. It involved money from a church offering plate.
In the early 1960's, my father was a United Church minister in the village of Hythe, Alberta.1 His office was in our slightly dilapidated manse, which was right next to the slightly dilapidated church, which was right next to the post office, which was right next to the only grocery store in the village.
The grocery store was tiny, with narrow aisles and wooden floors. But it had a cooler at the back, which was full of sugary pop.
So I took some of the money I found in an envelope in my dad's office, and I confidently strolled into the store for a six-pack of Coca Cola.
Like a lottery winner with more money than brains, I wasn't satisfied with a single bottle. A single bottle might have gone unnoticed. But the shopkeeper was quite aware that Coca Cola had never made an appearance on any of my mother’s grocery lists, and ¹ Hythe is now better known as the home of Wiebo Ludwig, convicted oil and gas industry terrorist. But back then, it was just a tiny place on remote highway with a hardware store, a Chinese restaurant, a bunch of muddy streets, and rows of caragana hedges attempting to invade the crumbling side-walks.
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that a minister’s salary was hardly sufficient to have permitted such an indulgence. So he didn't accept my money, and instead picked up the phone and told Mom about my new financial situation.
I next recall my father showing me a rather thin book with a photo of a happy family on the front cover, and a title that had the word "God" in it. As he turned the pages, it showed the family enjoying a picnic or walking to church or cheering a local sports team or playing fetch with a handsome collie. And each photo was accompanied by some inspiring words.
But the words didn't inspire me in the least. I knew I had done something wrong, and I knew my father was disappointed in me. But neither the words in the book, nor my dad's disappointment made the slightest impression on me...except for a vague feeling of unease and a longing for the lesson to be over with.
Another book in the house was Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care. Whether it was the lessons in this book or whether it was the lessons from the Sermon on the Mount, Dad never used corporal punishment on us kids. He was (and is) a gentle soul. In my early years, I would sometimes cry at night, knowing that someday he would, just like the rest of us, die.
In 1966, we moved to Fort St. John, B.C. It was only a couple of hours up the highway, but whereas Hythe was a village of 200
people, Fort St. John was a vast metropolis of 7,000. It had a Dairy Queen and a movie theatre and lots of paved streets that seemed to be made for 3-speed bicycles with banana seats and ape-hanger handlebars.
Tommy lived across the street, and he had the best sandbox on the block. It was oblong, so that we could easily reach across from any point to drive our Dinky/Corgi/Matchbox vehicles. And it was on the north side of his house, so it was cool on a hot day, and the moistened sand didn't dry up too quickly.
Brian was another friend, who lived a few blocks away in a 13
much bigger house and had much finer toys (such as a pool table in the basement and a 90 cc Suzuki motorcycle in the backyard).
The other element in this story was the candy store, which sold 3
jawbreakers for a penny, as well as many other delights suitable for rotting teeth.
One day, I met Tommy out on the street. I was on my orange 3-speed, and he was on his black single speed, with its fake gas tank attached to the top tube.
"Want some Ton-O-Gum?" I asked.
"Sure."
I started to break off a mammoth chunk from the pink slab and casually mentioned that I had taken a dime from Brian's room to make the purchase.
Tommy looked away. "Uh...I gotta go."
And then there was an uncomfortable silence as I had my first realization that not everyone in the world was a selfish jerk.
One day, a new student walked into our grade four class and the teacher introduced him. Tim had an English accent, curly hair, and a sweater with a few holes in it. When we were asked if anyone would like to help Tim get settled, my hand shot up. Perhaps it was due to the fact that Mom and Dad were born in Britain, and that we had gone there on a vacation a few years previous.
I hung out with Tim occasionally after school. Sometimes, we took our bikes to a huge undeveloped lot behind Brian's place, where there was a scrub forest criss-crossed with trails, and a frog pond teeming with tadpoles. And sometimes we hung out at the schoolyard with its rusty playground amusements and a surrounding fringe of willow bushes (the branches of which could, with a pocketknife, be fashioned into decent whistles).
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I do remember that one day, Tim took me to see his house. It was on the outskirts of town and and it seemed small and grimy. After that, I don't remember seeing Tim very much. He may have transferred to another school or moved to another town.
A year or two after that, I was at home when the door bell rang.
It was Tim.
"Hi! Remember me?" he said with a big smile.
"No, I don't remember you at all. Sorry."
"I'm Tim. Tim from school!"
"No. Sorry. I don't remember you." (Like Donald Trump, I had yet to develop any sense of shame.)
"Oh. OK." And with that, he simply walked away. And I shrugged, relieved that the burden of an inconvenient friendship had so easily disappeared.
I also remember this:
“McNab’s fleas!”
“McNab’s fleas!”
It was a cruel game of tag, which took place in our Grade 3
classroom. We pawned off imaginary fleas on each other from ____
McNab. She may not have been pretty, and she might have worn hand-me-down clothes, but we all knew damn well that she didn’t have fleas.
Years later, in Junior High, the taunt was “Choke it!” “Choke it!”, a cruel reference to the last name of ____ Choqette, a girl with a rather unfortunate DNA inheritance. I never called out the dreadful nickname, but neither did I have the intelligence or backbone to tell my friends to shut the fuck up.2
² The “sin of omission”, defined rather well in James 4:17 (“So whoever knows 15
In Tommy's sandbox, we played with Dinky Toys. But in the late 1960's, Hot Wheels arrived. Dinky Toys had wheels that turned, but Hot Wheels had wheels that turned fast! And they had their own slippery, smooth tracks with loops and jumps. And there was a finish gate with a plastic checkered flag that impartially told us who had the fastest car.
But after we had sorted out which cars were fastest and which were slowest, and after we had exhausted all the other possibilities (like sending a speeding Corvette off of the ramp into the ribs of the family pet), the fun started to wear off.
But wait! Brian had the updated version. Now, we wouldn't be slaves to a mere clamp on a table edge. Brian had the new Supercharger set that accelerated the cars via a pair of foam-edged spinning flywheels that gave each car a boost as it went through the little plastic garage attached to the track. And when that got boring, Brian managed to get Sizzlers, which were Hot Wheels with their own tiny batteries.
I couldn't afford those tracks, but at some point, Hot Wheels produced an evolutionary dead end that I could afford. It was heavily discounted at the store, presumably because no one else wanted it.3
It didn't have batteries and it didn't have humming flywheels that ran off of household current. It had big rubber bands attached to a set of catapults. Each time a car came around the track, I would have to reset the catapult, so that it would hit the back end of the car and send it whizzing off for another lap.
But even before I got back from the department store with the catapult contraption in my grubby little hands, my ten year old brain managed to form an extremely sobering thought. I realized that the novelty of the new track would not last. I might play with it for an the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.”) ³ In fact, it was such an evolutionary dead end, that even with a fairly extensive internet search, I could only find one other reference to it...from "Jeff" on www.feelingretro.com.
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hour or two – or maybe even a day or two. But the glitz and glamour would rapidly vanish, and like all of my other toys, it would gather dust. I had discovered the Buddhist concept of anicca (or impermanence).
...at least for month or so. My birthday was approaching, you see, so the concept of anicca rapidly lost ground to the much more enticing concept of Kenner's Smash Up Derby! 4
At that age, I looked forward to the next MAD magazine like I currently look forward to the next Atlantic Monthly. MAD in the late 60's and early 70's was a refreshing antidote to anything authoritarian. Plus, it was a secret entry into a lot of the adult pleasures that I wouldn't normally have access to – in particular, the sardonic send-ups of movies that I still was too young to see in the theatres.
I first came across MAD in a department store in Edmonton (a rare family trip, since it was a full day’s drive from Fort St. John). I grabbed a copy off of the stack and showed it to my dad, asking if I could buy it with my hard earned nickels. He thumbed through it for a while and gave me the nod. I don't think he had ever seen it before, either. But I suspect that certain aspects of it – such as its anti-Vietnam war slant – resonated well with both United Church theology and his NDP (New Democratic Party) voting patterns.
I'm not sure how much the MAD ideology rubbed off on me, but it certainly gave me a window on the world which I had previously ignored. Before MAD, I was so ignorant about world affairs that I thought Martin Luther King was a prime minister of Canada. After all, it was just a couple of weeks after he was shot that Pierre Trudeau became our head of state.
MAD magazine may have been a learning tool, but it was also a commodity to be coveted and hoarded. Our grade eight Language ⁴ “..crash, bang, crash ‘em up. Put ‘em back again. Crash, bang, smash ‘em up.
It's smash up time, my friend." (Sung with a slightly southern-Country twang) 17
Arts teacher, Mr. Lawrence, had a big stack of them at the back of the classroom, and he allowed us to read them if we finished our classroom assignments before the bell. But his stack was way bigger than my stack. So naturally, I got into the habit of inserting the occasional issue in amongst my school books. However, at some point, he raised the alarm, and a search of our home-room desks ensued. Luckily though, the detective work was assigned to our class clown, so it became a slapdash effort, and I dodged another bullet.
In the early 70’s, we moved to Calgary. It was a traumatic experience, moving from a town of 7,000 people to an endless metropolis of half a million. Not only did I have to leave familiar surroundings and friends, but there seemed to be a different atmosphere about the place. A harder edge. An air of indifference. It was like Hythe versus Gotham City.
I first noticed it during recess at our Junior High School. I had just switched over from an elementary school, so that transition was difficult enough. But now the big city became personified in the form of an older bully who went around giving gonchies5 to the younger students. It was the first day of class, and he was having a delightful time, going from victim to victim. Fortunately for me, I was still dressed in Fort St. John attire, which meant un-hip trousers and a fairly snug belt. It was the belt that saved me, since the bully attempted for a minute or so to reach down past it, but soon gave up in order to stalk easier prey.
The main irony in it all (which occurred to me even before I knew what the word “irony” meant) was that the bully had his own belt with a large buckle in the shape of a clenched hand with the index and ring finger extended in a "V".6 "Peace, man!" said the ⁵ More commonly known to fans of The Simpsons as wedgies, where the perpetrator seizes the rear waistband of the victim's underpants and hauls upwards, causing a goodly amount of material to get wedged between the two halves of said victim's bum cheeks. Also potentially uncomfortable for the scrotum, due to the increased pressure being transmitted to the front of the underpants.
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However, even though I noted the irony, the message I took away from the experience was not one of peace, but of the importance of belligerent swagger.
Not long after that, I had my first and only fist fight. I was walking home from school down one of the back alleys8 when I came upon a group of kids about my age from the local Catholic School. I thought that it was necessary to keep my direction of travel, and so I strode through the lot, and managed to bump one or two.
"Fight him, Joe! Fight him!"
Joe was even shorter than me, but he obviously had experience in this arena before, so he promptly showed me who was the boss.
Luckily, this was the early 1970's, before swarmings, and before our ⁶ This symbol was used by the hippie movement in the 1960's, but also by Winston Churchill during WWII to denote victory. It was thought to have originated centuries ago, when archers held their hands up to foes and allies alike, showing that they were still quite capable of pulling back a deadly bowstring with the two fingers, and that they had not been captured (which often entailed having the two offending digits amputated).
⁷ This juxtaposition of the symbol with its antithesis was common in the 1970's, which had the counter-cultural message of non-materialism, along with the capitalist urge to make money off of it. At about the same time as the gonchie incident, I put brightly coloured, hollow plastic straws on the spokes of my bicycle wheels, because they looked cool and sounded cool as they slid up and down the spokes. The name of the product was called Cycle-delic, taken from the word psychedelic. So while the Latin root of “psychedelic” means to make "manifest" the "soul", “Cycle-delic” was simply an inane form of kiddie bling sold in the 1970's equivalent of a Wal-Mart.
⁸ Alleys were fairly important thoroughfares for young pedestrians, since they were often short-cuts, and they often provided some degree of cover for activities that grown-ups would frown on. A favourite in our time was to fling a tin can that had been flattened by a few vehicles. This deadly frisbee would fly half the length of a football field in an unpredictable manner, and it amazes me that – as far as I know – we never managed to break a window or put an eye out.
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culture went from shoot-em-up westerns with a modicum of civility, to shoot-em-up video games, where it is apparently justifiable to kill police officers on a whim. So it was a fair fight, with fists only, and after a few minutes, I exited the scene without so much as even a bloody nose.
Well, that's was the selfish little snot. Now I'll introduce a kid who was quite the opposite. Warning: the incident involves bed-wetting.
Sometimes, bed-wetting can be amusing. James Joyce noted – in toddler-speak – that "When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold." But just as often, it can be a nightmare. At the boarding school he went to, George Orwell was regularly humiliated for it in front of the other boys by "Flip" the Headmistress, and
"flogged" mercilessly with a riding-crop for it by "Sambo" the Headmaster. "You dir-ty lit-tle boy"9 he shouted, as each syllable coincided with a thunderous whack on Orwell's bum. Indeed, Sambo was so merciless, that on one of those syllables, he managed to snap his riding-crop in two.
Up until I was about ten years old, I also wet the bed on a fairly regular basis. So Mom put a plastic cover on the mattress, and over the bottom sheet, she put a section of folded flannel down by my hips to soak up the majority of the expected piss. On the other hand, Dad's technique was preventative...if not quite scientific. It was an attempt to somehow influence my autonomic nervous system by raising my allowance from 25 cents a week to 35 cents, with the proviso that 5 cents would be taken off for each morning that Mom had to wash the flannel. I don't remember it working terribly well, but at least I was still raking in an average of about 25 cents each week...and there was definitely no humiliation involved from either parent.
⁹ From “Such, Such Were the Joys” in “Funny, but not Vulgar”. Folio Society, 1998. p.226.
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In Grade 6, I hung out with Lance. During the 70-71 NHL
season, we both enjoyed collecting and trading the Esso Power Player cards which everyone’s fathers picked up whenever they gassed up their cars. And when that got boring, our next obsession became assembling plastic model kits of airplanes and fast cars.
That summer, I got invited to Lance's place for a BBQ and sleep-over. His parents had a tent trailer in the back yard, so I brought along a sleeping bag, pyjamas, and flash-light. However, that evening, his mom made hot chocolate for us, and I knew that if I accepted a mug of it, I'd be tempting fate. But the sight and aroma of those tiny coloured marshmallows floating on top of hot, creamy cocoa overcame my hesitancy. And afterward, I figured that if I crawled into my sleeping back with my jeans still on, they might serve to cover up any potential accident.
Wrong. The next morning, when we went in for breakfast, there was a noticeable stench in the air. So I feebly made some sort of excuse to go home for breakfast, and neither Lance nor his mom argued with me.
I suppose if I was in Lance's shoes, I might have quit building model cars with the bed-wetter. I might have even taunted the bed-wetter at the school play-ground. Who knows?
A week or two after the sleep-over, I saw Lance for the last time,10 since it was just prior to my family's move from Fort St. John to Calgary. Lance and I had just watched the Saturday matinee at the ¹⁰
Actually, no. Nearly two decades after that, I was a student at the U. of A., and while chatting with a fellow student in the Forestry faculty, I noticed someone on the other side of the room who had a peculiar -- but strangely familiar -- way of eating potato chips. He would eat a chip, and then rub his fingers together to get rid of the salt. Eat a chip. Rub. Eat a chip. Rub. Then it struck me. Could this person be Lance? So I walked over and introduced myself. And sure enough, he was the same fellow who chose not to point out the obvious stench at breakfast. We chatted for a few minutes, and I found out that he was a year or two behind me in the program. But that was that. I should have kept ties with him, but even as an adult, I was still a bit of an introverted jerk. I see he's doing well now, though. I just googled his name, and he's very high up in one of the BC crown corporations.
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Lido Theatre, and his father picked us up in his car. Lance pointed to the rear shelf of the sedan, where there was a box wrapped in brown paper. "That's for you". I was a bit puzzled, but after a bit more prodding, I took it and tore off the paper. It was the much coveted plastic model kit of Don Prudhomme's dragster, the "Snake" (famous for racing against Tom McEwan's "Mongoose"...not only on drag strips, but also on Hot Wheels tracks). I'm not sure what eventually happened to the Snake, but for at least a year or two, it occupied a prominent spot on a window ledge in Calgary. And even though the move to Calgary was otherwise a very traumatic experience for me, I somehow never stank up the flannel sheets again.
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The scourge of acne1 hit me in grade nine. It wasn’t severe enough that it left any of the Bill Murray-type scarring, but it definitely scarred me in other ways.
So, given that, plus my short stature (I don't think I ever made it over 5' 6"), I wound up in the middle stratum of our high school pecking order. The top stratum included the jocks and the cheerleaders, as well as those who looked and behaved enough like a jock or a cheerleader to fit in. The lower stratum consisted of the nerds2 who behaved like school was more important than peer pressure.
The rest of us had neither the brains nor the looks necessary to fit into the other two categories. School was a useless ordeal, and although we desperately wanted to go to the cool parties and meet the hot babes, genetics dictated otherwise.
During our free time, we would hang out in the parking lots of the various neighbourhood 7-elevens. We would gulp down slurpees and gobble down Mars bars and talk about important ¹ Acne has always been a nightmare for some teenagers, but the attitude of many dermatologists (including mine at the time) only served to make things worse. In contrast to the old truism "you are what you eat", he peddled the lie that acne and diet weren't related...or at least that it's much harder for the medical profession to sell dietary information, than it is to sell office visits and medication. I took the cruel paradigm to be gospel in my teen years and I suffered greatly as a consequence. Fortunately, however, I finally went to the library in my late teens and found a book called "Acne Can be Cured" by Gustave Hoehn. And sure enough, a diet lower in fats and hydrogenated this-and-that worked a miracle within just a week or two. However, by then it was already too late to heal the psychic wounds.
² Carl Grillmair was one of the nerds. We were both in Mr. Campbell's Electricity class, but obviously he took it a lot more seriously than I did. These days, he is noted as being an astronomer who finds potentially earth-like planets in other solar systems. His curriculum vitae is about as long as your arm and includes notes on how many hours he has logged on the Hubble Space Telescope.
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matters, such as the TV fare from the previous night, and whether or not a particular girl in a particular class happened to have worn a bra on a particular day.
However, it was in one of those parking lots on a lazy summer night when my world changed dramatically. Rob (a friend from Scouting) pulled up on his XL350 motorcycle, and with a sly grin, motioned us over to have a look at something he had hidden away in his helmet. It was a plastic baggie containing some dried vegetative matter.
A shiver went up my spine. The dreaded substance had arrived.
My friends and I would now inevitably become ensnared. I knew it was dangerous, but I also knew that I desperately wanted to be included in with whatever my friends were doing.
A weekend or two later, Sam (a friend from various truancy and shoplifting adventures) had his parents’ house to himself, and so a small party3 got started. Of course, there was some beer and a mickey or two of rum, but now there was also pot.
The conventional wisdom was that the first time you smoked it, you wouldn't get high. It might take two or three sessions. And that was how it happened with both Sam and me. Several puffs, all inhaled deeply. But nothing. Oh well.
Dean was also in our circle of friends, and it was at his place a few days later that I finally found out what pot was all about. It was noon-hour on a school day. His folks weren't home, but his older sister was. She was gorgeous and she was smart. Maybe not school smart, but she knew about music and she knew about books. Maybe not the Mozart and Tolstoy type of music and books, but certainly the Frank Zappa and Carlos Castenada4 type of music and books.
³ This was in the days before Twitter and Facebook facilitated large, destructive mobs of drunken Neanderthals. So the small party remained small, and Sam's parents' house remained unscathed.
⁴ A bestselling author with a Phd in Anthropology, and an abiding interest in both native spirituality and a psychedelic species of cactus (peyote) found only in Mexico and Texas. Time magazine (March 5, 1973), paraphrasing 24
And of course, it was the latter type of cultural wizardry that really mattered.
"Evan hasn't gotten stoned yet? Well, I'll get him stoned. Don't worry about that."
And indeed she did. After a small pipe bowl full, I was well and truly high. I had joined the club, the secret brother and sisterhood that the world had known for millennia. And it wasn't quite what I had expected.
Actually, I didn't know what to expect. Over the previous weeks, I realized that the still-somewhat-tenacious joint puffing, axe murdering, Mansonesque stereotypes from previous decades5 were just myths. My friends were still relatively sane, and no one had gone on a blood-soaked crime spree yet. But I still had no idea how I might feel under the influence.
As we walked to school that afternoon, my feelings alternated between euphoria and paranoia. The euphoria is difficult to describe, but at various times in the weeks and months and years ahead, I felt elated to be merely alive. Whether I was looking at the complex branching patterns on a tree or whether I was digging a ditch, the world was an utterly marvellous place to be living in.
The paranoia is much easier to describe. I knew I was high, and I was certain that the whole world could read my face like a book.
And, of course, I was also in the middle of those years when the hormonal rush was as much a hindrance as a joy. Like many other male teens, I often had to walk down the school hallway with my Winston Churchill, called him “an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a tortilla.” Critics are still divided as to whether his books are fiction or non-fiction.
⁵ Much of it derived from over‐the‐top ideological nonsense, such as the 1936
film called Reefer Madness, which depicts rape, manslaughter and suicide as the consequences of having a few puffs. Today, the film is a cult classic, shown in smaller art house theatres to people (often under the influence) wanting to have a few chuckles over the notion of an establishment so paranoid about a recreational drug from the Afro-American ghetto, that it would stop at nothing to demonize it.
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clutch of books strategically placed in front of my crotch. And now, with the aphrodisiac powers of marijuana surging in my veins – and with peers and parents and teachers all most certainly looking at me with either amusement or disgust – I often felt like I had taken one puff too many.
A third feeling came over me during the following weeks and months. It was the dawning realization that society was capable of lying to me. Marijuana didn't cause me to go mad and neither did I start to crave heroin. And if I was suddenly faced with the prospect of “dry” times , I didn't start to climb the walls in a feverish sweat.6
Over the next decade or two of fairly regular use, I found that on the first dry day, I would momentarily think "gee, I could use a toke right now" perhaps a dozen times or more. The fleeting thought would disappear as fast as any other thought. On the second day, the fleeting thought would occur perhaps a half dozen times. And so on.
After a week, it might be once a day. And after well over a decade (as at present), I find that that thought pops up...hmm, maybe once a year? Usually, it's on those occasions when I’m watching the newscasts of amiable potheads puffing away in front of a town hall or a legislature building, trying to assert their rights to alter their consciousness.7
Of course, some people like to alter their consciousness a bit more than others. These people hang out in bars a bit more than they ought to. These people often mix their pleasures. These people often progress to other types of mind altering drugs which are much more habit forming. And as I found out later in life, Dean's older sister was one of these people.
⁶ As noted in the Wikipedia entry on “marijuana addiction”, although there is a common withdrawal syndrome associated with marijuana, there is not the same potential for serious physical dependency normally associated with drugs such as nicotine, alcohol and heroin.
⁷ This particular sentence was first written about four years before Trudeau the Younger legalized pot on October 17, 2018. However, the sentence was also written about four decades after the Le Dain Commission recommended precisely the same thing to the government of Trudeau the Elder…with zero effect.
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During this time, the quantities of alcohol I consumed often got into the stupid realm. The only saving grace was that the habit was just a weekend pursuit. I didn't crave it during the rest of the week. I simply guzzled it during the weekend parties in order to gain acceptance with the guys and to more easily talk to the girls.
Of course, I also smoked pot at the parties to an excessive degree, but the effect on my consciousness of the relatively expensive weed was easily obliterated by the effect of the dirt-cheap mickeys of rum that I favoured.
Alcohol is supposed to loosen the tongue…though I don't recall any transcendent conversations. What I do remember was urinating off of the front steps of my parents' place when I commandeered the house for a party. I also remember a few beer stains on the carpet and the stinking ashtrays the next day. But luckily, the place didn't get utterly trashed and luckily, I didn't do it a second time, due to the perceived imbalance between the initial fun and the subsequent clean up.
The lowest point came when I tried to drink a 26’er of gin at a party. I remember the first half hour or so. But then there was just a blank. And after that blank, my next memory was of myself sprawled across the back seat of my old Datsun 510, which happened to be parked nicely in front of my parents' house. It was a bright Sunday morning, and the car was an oven. I didn't feel terribly well, and I immediately noticed that the clothing around my crotch was damp and not smelling particularly fresh. Another friend, Dan (who introduced me and Dean to the jaw-dropping spectacle of Saturday Night Live), had driven me home…fortunately. Otherwise, I might have woke up in a rural ditch or an urban alley or perhaps not at all.
After that, I toned down the drinking somewhat. That is, I reverted back to the mickey. That way, I could at least remember a few more of the stupid things that I did.
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It wasn't too long after I first started smoking pot that my parents found out. I had been smoking with a fellow who we only knew as
"Chemical Kid" (platform shoes, bell-bottoms, and heavily glazed eyes). He was either from a rich background or he was a dealer, since he always used to have a lot of the stuff on him. The mere mention of his name (usually just shortened to "Chemical") was enough to induce fits of laughter in us, since his face seemed to be permanently on the verge of dribbling down to the floor (just like on Robert Crumb’s “Stoned Again” poster).
I hadn't been quite so wrecked in a long time, and my eyes must have been quite red. When I got home, Mom noticed it right away and asked if anything was wrong. Of course, I said “no”, and I somehow managed to make it to the sanctity of my room without going through the gauntlet of any more questions.
Nothing more was said, but the beans were spilled some time in the next few months when our family went for a vacation in the truck camper. Of course I took along a small stash. I hid it in my clothing cubby hole, in one of my socks. But on the last day, as we rumbled down the highway towards home, Mom started to do a bit of pre-arrival packing (it was still legal to walk about in the back of a truck camper while speeding along at 100 kph). And she must have found the sock, because shortly after that, the vehicle stopped, all us kids all got shunted into the back, and her and Dad had some sort of serious discussion in the cab.
When we got home, my sisters were sent to their rooms, and a very solemn conversation ensued. Dad asked me when I was going to give up smoking the stuff.
“I’ll never give it up.” The resolute calmness with which I said it made its own statement.
There weren't any consequences. As I mentioned before, Dad wasn't big on punishment, physical or otherwise. And in hindsight, I suspect he probably did the right thing. A visit to the wood-shed –
either literally or figuratively – would have built up nothing more 28
Fast forward a few years, and I was smoking pot on a more regular basis. I was holding down a regular job in an automotive parts warehouse; I always arrived on time; and I took very few sick days. That helped to smooth things over both with the family and with society at large. However, I was smoking several times a day, every day...even at work (as were at least half of the other employees, so an appreciable portion of our coffee breaks and lunch hours were spent up on the mezzanine floor with either a bong or a some hash oil on a cigarette).
Of course, the law of diminishing returns kicked in, and my tolerance level climbed higher and higher.
Mom's most common question at this time was: "how much are you spending on that old pot?" ("that old" somehow indicating a strange mix of endearing familiarity and contempt.) I usually replied about twenty dollars a week, which was both fairly accurate and approximately ten percent of my income.
Fortunately, I decided to go to university in 1985. Not only did my earlier connections dry up, but studying cell biology while under the influence was a lot harder to do than sorting mufflers on a pallet while under the influence.
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Janice was 14. I was 16. So Dad warned me: "Just remember: she's only a year older than your little sister." However, as noted in previous chapters, parental warnings had little effect on me.
She was originally going out with Todd, who had a shiny new F150 pick-up truck. So when they broke up, and I subsequently heard through the grapevine that she liked me, I was puzzled...but elated. 45 years later, I can only guess why she might have liked a short, pimple-faced guy like me. Maybe it was because up until then, she had only seen me on a few weekday evenings (ie, when I wasn’t shit-faced drunk).
And indeed, it was a weekday evening when I picked her up for the first time. We went to someone’s parents’ house, where there was a small, sober gathering in the basement den. Perhaps the TV
was turned on, showing M*A*S*H or the Six Million Dollar Man.
Or maybe the girls had one of their scratchy pieces of pop vinyl on the turntable (invariably either Supertramp's Crime of the Century, or Wings' Venus and Mars).
In the other corner of the room, there was a big La-Z-Boy recliner. And although I don't remember talking with Janice about anything – ever – I do recall that we quickly found ourselves in that recliner. Oblivious to the others, we held each other and kissed…very slowly. And when we drew our tongues apart, I felt as though there was a small orb of energy suspended between them.1
¹
Too much information? No. Rather, too little. Because to this day, I don’t know what that “small orb of energy” was. Several years after the event, while checking out the shelves in a New Age bookstore, I saw the same phenomenon depicted on the cover of The Human Aura (author: Nicholas Regush). It was likely a doctored photo (two people about to kiss, with spiky aural fringes around them, and a small orange sphere suspended between their mouths), but at the time, it was a strong confirmation of what I felt in that La-Z-Boy.
Now, when I look back on it, I wonder. Could it have been something metaphysical? After all, physics has now shown that what Einstein once derided as “spooky action at a distance” (or "quantum entanglement", to use 30
It might have been ten minutes, or it might have been an hour. But it felt like an eternity. And it was the first time that I had ever kissed a girl.
It wasn't long after that when I started lusting after her friend, Jo-Anne. In fact, my next memory of Janice is of her sitting in the back seat of a crowded car at a drive-in theatre on an alcohol-fueled weekend. I was in the front seat, trying to kiss Jo-Anne. Jo-Anne, of course, was extremely uncomfortable, but in my drunken hormonal state, I could only begin to detect her discomfort after about a half-hour of trying to stick my tongue down her throat.
My third and final memory of Janice was at another of the weekend parties, when someone mentioned that she was looking for a ride home (hint, hint). I wasn't interested. Apparently, I was only interested in boosting my own ego by crushing someone else's. I remember her standing forlornly on the front steps of the house where the party was winding down, while I started up my car and left.
I'm not sure what I think of the Hindu/Buddhist concept of karma.2 However, in my case, it certainly worked. Nearly two decades passed before I next had any kind of significant, intimate, the technical term) is real. Communication at the sub-atomic level can occur instantaneously across vast inter-stellar distances...or maybe across a few centimetres, while reclining in a La-Z-Boy. This is not homespun drivel, but solid research from physicists at MIT, the University of Vienna, and the University of California at San Diego. And it builds on quantum entanglement studies going back to the 1960’s.
But don't take my word for it. Check out PBS's Nova series on the matter (go to Youtube and search “quantum riddle 2019”). At 47 minutes into the video, we hear:“[The results of the experiment] mean that…an action in one place can have an instant effect anywhere in the universe, as if there is no space between them…”. So “spooky action” is real. Therefore, a bit of humility is in order whenever we’re tempted to think that the universe is simply built out of bricks and mortar, and that every paranormal claim has the same validity as the 1967 attempt to levitate the Pentagon. After all, that cell phone in your hand could not have been made without the help of “quantum theory”
(google it!).
31
physical relationship with a woman.
² …or the Christian version: "...for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." (Galatians 6:7)
32
Just like Rupert Bear1 comics (in the mid-1960's) and MAD
magazines (in the early 1970's) exerted a strong hold on my psyche, the late-1970’s offered up something called High Times. I still have the first copy that I ever bought (July, 1976). And just like I occasionally enjoy reading through my old Rupert Bear books and MAD magazines, I get the same pleasant feelings of nostalgia as I flip through the tattered pages of this ancient ode to recreational drug use.
High Times was mainly concerned with marijuana. However, it also had advertisements and articles relating to cocaine. A quick content analysis of my 1976 issue reveals no leading articles on the drug, but there are plenty of advertisements for silver coke spoons, a page full of information given to various cocaine busts, and within the "Trans-High Market Quotations" section, there are some of the then-current prices listed (eg, in the Great Lakes region, cocaine was $75 to $125 a gram, with the quality "on decline", whereas in Bogota, Columbia, it was $300 to $400 an ounce and "becoming very hot to handle").
Like a typical teenager, I was somewhat impressionable. So cocaine easily registered on the “interesting” side of the ledger.
Fortunately though, I also had a well-worn library card. And I had fond memories of public libraries going back to my days in Fort St John: the attractive librarian with her slender stylus, oh-so-carefully pressing out due dates on cards tucked into the back of books which detailed the adventures of Henry Huggins and Homer Price2. My memories of the Calgary Public Library were more recent, but they ¹ A British comic strip character dating from as far back as 1920. My grandmother regularly sent me the annuals when I was a child. The artwork was marvellous, and there was flawlessly metered rhyme to accompany the pictures (as opposed to the typical speech balloons for Archie and Donald Duck). But as marvellous as Rupert was, I never bothered to write a single thank-you note to "Nana".
² Marvellously written and illustrated Americana about nerdy, adventurous boys in the 1940's and 1950's (hey, we were all nerds back then).
33
were still fond: the massive wooden card catalogue, which I pawed through in order to find books about building model airplanes and making shortwave radio antennas.
But this time, I looked under "C" for cocaine, where I found the book Cocaine Papers, written by Sigmund Freud (the famous neurologist who began the practice of psychoanalysis in the late 19th century). Freud was an early user and proponent of the drug, and he recommended it as an anti-depressant, as well as a cure for morphine addiction.
I suppose that given the knowledge of the drug at the time (it wasn't isolated from the coca plant until 1855), Freud might be forgiven for being a trifle naïve,3 and thus perhaps not the best source for a young man with visions of silver coke spoons dancing before his eyes. However, I still read through the massive tome (easily the heaviest book I had ever lugged home from a library), which meant that it must’ve been at least somewhat engrossing (and one person agrees with me, since the single review on amazon.com gives it 5 out of 5 stars).
Many years later, about all I can remember from the book is an account of the Bavarian army being issued the drug to help it on its occasional long marches. So, at the time, my conclusion was that cocaine was an interesting drug, but essentially it was nothing more than caffeine on steroids (and in fact, both drugs are classified as habit-forming stimulants). The interest dwindled, and at no time after that did I ever try to score any of the white powder.
However, the 1976 High Times issue also featured an interview with Albert Hofmann.4 At the Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland in 1938, Hofmann was the first scientist to isolate the LSD5 molecule ³ In fact, much of the later analysis of the book shows that Freud was blind to the obvious negative effects of the drug.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/oct/13/physician-heal-thyself-part-ii/?pagination=false
⁴ If it appears that the image of Hoffmann on the next page was painted on fabric, then you have a good eye. This, and many other similar images in this book were painted by myself on t-shirts that I wore in the 1980’s.
34
from a fungus on
rye plants (for
research into
bleeding
complications
associated with
childbirth). Five
years later, he
accidentally
absorbed a very
small amount
through his skin
and became the
first human to trip
on acid. 63 years
after that, in a New
York Times interview,6 he called LSD “medicine for the soul”. And finally, in 2008, he died of natural causes, at the age of 102.
In a preface to the High Times interview, Hofmann wrote:
"I was at first not in agreement with the idea of publishing this interview here. I was surprised and shocked at the existence of such a magazine, whose text and advertising tended to treat the subject of illegal drugs with a casual and non-responsible attitude.”
But later: “Nevertheless, I came to the decision that my statement's appearing in a magazine directed to readers who use currently illegal drugs might be of special value and could help to diminish the abuse or misuse of the psychedelic drugs.”
⁵ Lysergic acid diethylamide. According to Wikipedia, LSD is "non‐addictive, is not known to cause brain damage, and has extremely low toxicity relative to dose, although in rare cases adverse psychiatric reactions such as anxiety or delusions are possible."
⁶ In the January 7��, 2006 issue, in an article by Craig S. Smith, titled Nearly 100, LSD's Father Ponders His 'Problem Child' .
35
As I once again read through the yellowing pages of this battered old magazine, I am pleased to see that even at that young age, I was already in the habit of underlining text. So I now have a good sense of what I was thinking at the time. At one point in the interview, the editor asks Hofmann: "For many people, LSD provides what they describe as a religious experience. What are your feelings on this?"
And I see that I had underlined the following:
"Another reason for the incidence of religious experiences is the fact that the very core of the human mind is connected with God. This deepest root of our consciousness, which in the normal state is hidden by superficial rational activities of the mind, may become revealed by the action of the psychedelic drug."
Speaking of God, I had quit going to church several years earlier. My parents didn't argue, realizing the futility of trying to force me. But I remember my dad confronting me one day, asking if I still believed in God (or that entity which Northrup Frye called “the ferocious old bugger up in the sky with the whiskers and the reactionary political views…”).7 I replied in the negative. It was certainly inconvenient to believe in God, given the boredom of church attendance. And it was a bit of an intellectual stretch, given that science and religion have always had a somewhat stormy relationship (astronomers were no longer being burned at the stake, but on one occasion, I recall Mom being somewhat dismayed when I happened to mention that we had evolved from fishes). However, the linkage between God and an illegal drug (as proposed by Hofmann) was a bit of an eye-opener to a young cynic like myself.
In January, 1977, just a few months after the High Times issue, another magazine published a bit of earth-shattering material that played with my mind. My parents had a subscription to Reader's ⁷ From Northrup Frye in Conversation by David Cayley. House of Anansi Press, 1992. Concord, Ontario. P.53. (The inclusion of that quote, though worth a good chuckle, is not really fair to either my dad or the United Church, since neither of them can be described as being remotely reactionary) 36
Digest, and in that month, its Condensed Book section highlighted Raymond Moody's Life After Life. Moody, a psychologist and medical doctor, studied what we now call "near-death experiences".
You know the typical scenario: the heart stops, the soul floats up over the lifeless body, there's an intense white light radiating love, the subject sees loved ones who have gone before, and then he/she gets sucked back into the body, since it isn't yet time to go. It has such common cultural currency now, that I can think of at least two episodes of The Simpsons where it featured quite prominently: one where their dog dies and one where Mr. Burns dies.
But in 1977, coming shortly after the Hofmann interview, it was doubly fascinating. And it must have been for others, also. My grade 12 math teacher, Mrs. Wong, asked the class if anyone had read the article in Reader's Digest. She probably wasn't too surprised when I was the only one to raise my hand, since she often had to reprimand me in class for reading non-math material.
"Do you think what he wrote was true?"
"Oh yeah, I think so." I said.
She just nodded her head and then her thoughts momentarily went somewhere else. The rest of the class had absolutely no idea what we were talking about.
Later on, when I worked in an auto exhaust parts warehouse, and I was grabbing a pipe from a bin high up over the concrete floor, I momentarily pondered what would happen if I just let go. Of course, there would be a "splat!" But would I float above my body and see the white light?
On one particular day in 1978, I ingested a "purple microdot". It was a small, cylindrical purple pill, about the size of a large grain of sand. It was mostly just filler (ie, whatever non-medicinal ingredients that pills are mostly made up of), but within the filler, it held about 100 micrograms of LSD. That's 100 millionths of a gram.
A dollar bill weighs about a gram, so if you chopped one up into 37
10,000 tiny paper chunks, one of those chunks (a single square millimetre) would weigh about 100 micrograms.
In a scaled up analogy, if a dose of LSD was the same size as a penny, then a dose of cocaine (about 1/10th of a gram) would be a stack of pennies about 5 feet high. And the alcohol content from a single glass of wine (10 grams) would be a stack reaching half way up the side of the Empire State Building.
Luckily, I made the choice to ingest the drug on a weekday evening (ie, without alcohol). A bunch of us were at another one of the dreadful basement dens with the parents' bar and the shag rug and the lumpy couches. The parents were home, so we were likely just watching TV…sports, I’m guessing, since if it was anything remotely interesting (like a PBS nature documentary), it would have surely imprinted itself on my memory. But as it was, my friends were doing their normal boring activities, and I was free to mentally cloister myself (they were aware that I had dropped some acid, but since it was a fairly modest dose, my outward behaviour didn’t attract any undue attention).
The main thing that I recall about that trip 40 years ago was the very distinct impression that my mind had become somewhat disassociated from my body. The analogy that came to me at the time was of someone operating a hydraulic excavator. I was the operator in the cab, pulling levers this way and that. And my body was the excavator itself, moving about in response to the signals given to it. I felt like a tiny entity inside my skull, telling my arms and legs what to do.
And that was about it. The peak experience might have only lasted about half an hour. The rest of the time, I just felt a mild revulsion against the typical proletarian nonsense coming from my boisterous buddies. And there were no after-effects the following day.
The weekend came and I hurried off to the library, where I found The Politics of Ecstasy by Timothy Leary. Looking back, my main recollection from the book was his model unifying the various levels of consciousness. Eight in all. And it must have struck a chord with 38
other “innernauts”, since I see there is now a thorough description in Wikipedia under the heading Eight-circuit model of consciousness.8
⁸ I’ll summarize (since the Wikipedia entry is seven pages long). It describes eight levels of consciousness. Some of the lower levels, we share with other animals; some of the higher levels are those which are only attainable through disciplines such as meditation or via specific psychedelic drugs.
The lowest level is the bio-survival circuit, associated with either going towards nourishment or away from danger. The human infant becomes imprinted at this level, depending on whether his/her environment is a nourishing/trusting one or a painful/scary one. In terms of animal consciousness, the invertebrates would be at this level.
The second level is the emotional-territorial circuit, which is associated with dominance versus submission, as well as territoriality. This is the stage where the human toddler's brain gets imprinted with either dominance or a more cooperative outlook. In the animal kingdom, wolf packs are well known for utilizing dominance/submission and territoriality.
The third level is the symbolic and dexterity circuit, associated with analysis and invention and tool use. When the first proto-humans broke away from the rest of the primates, this circuit became dominant.
The fourth level is the domestic and socio-sexual circuit, associated with tribal morals. It concerns both the acculturation of the young, as well as the transmission of culture across generations.
The neuro-somatic circuit is next, where a more in-depth awareness of the body occurs. It also takes the form of a hedonistic detachment from the concerns of the previous four circuits.
The neuro-electric circuit involves awareness of the body's nervous system and the potential reprogramming of the imprinting of the first four circuits.
The neuro-genetic circuit is associated with awareness of the body's DNA and RNA, supposedly tying in with memories of past lives and reincarnation, etc.
My personal thought is that DNA would be utterly incapable of encoding such memories. Perhaps they would be better lumped in with the next circuit?
The last circuit is the psycho-atomic or quantum circuit, associated with awareness beyond the ordinary space-time continuum. Out-of-body and near-death experiences are supposedly associated with this realm.
39
In the following years, I read a few more of Leary's books, but at some point, he started proposing space travel and colonization as the main answer to humanity's problems. I saw this as elitist nonsense, and I thought about the other 99.9% of us, who would be trapped on this nest which we are so adept at fouling up. Wouldn't it make much more sense to
simply clean up our
act? And perhaps
not have quite so
many babies while
we're at it?
Soon after
reading Leary, I
started reading
Aldous Huxley. If
Leary was the Bart
Simpson of the
psychedelic world,
then Huxley was its
version of Walter
Cronkite. Leary
advised pretty much
everybody to "turn
on, tune in, drop
out", whereas
Huxley advised constraint. Leary wound up in a federal prison, in a cell adjacent to Charles Manson's, whereas Huxley was awarded the Companion of Literature by the U.K.'s Royal Society of Literature.
Their lives could not have been more different from each other. And yet...
At about 11 a.m., on May 6, 1953, in a comfortable house somewhere in the hills above Hollywood, Huxley ingested 0.4 grams of mescaline, another psychedelic compound. After about an hour and a half, he looked at a vase of flowers on the kitchen table:
"At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colours. But that was no longer 40
the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his
creation-the
miracle,
moment by
moment, of
naked
existence."9
He was
seeing something,
but he was not
attaching any
concepts to it. Later
on, he saw something
that the rest of us
tend to attach far too
many concepts to:
"We
walked out
into the street.
A large pale
blue automobile was standing at the curb. At the sight of it, I was suddenly overcome by enormous merriment.
What complacency, what an absurd self-satisfaction beamed from those bulging surfaces of glossiest enamel! Man had created the thing in his own image -
or rather in the image of his favourite character in fiction. I laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks."
⁹ This quote and the next quote were taken from Huxley's book The Doors of Perception, first published in 1952, but also in 2011 by Thinking Ink Limited (New York), pages 5 and 28. The term "doors of perception" was lifted from a poem by William Blake, the English poet and mystic who lived in the late 18��
and early 19�� century. Huxley's book title subsequently became the inspiration for the 1960's rock group, The Doors.
41
Obviously, this was a drug that was not conducive to rampant consumerism. And indeed, 13 years later, it was outlawed.
Dean loved booze – perhaps a bit more than most. And Dean could be a nasty drunk. Some people get mellow when they get drunk; others get crazy. Dean was in the latter group, so he would occasionally look for someone to pick on. And at one party, that turned out to be me. However – coward that I was – I simply reminded him that there was someone else at the party who was even a riper target for abuse than I was: Perry, with his disco shirt and platform shoes. And Dean fell for it.
Like a lot of the other boozers, Dean would sometimes take his alcohol laced with a nominal amount of LSD. Was it because Dean liked the sensory changes associated with the latter? Was it because Dean was a bit of a philosophizer? No, it was because LSD enabled him to drink more than he otherwise could. Booze is classified as a depressant, so it's at the opposite end of the spectrum to the psychedelics. Just like venom and anti-venom or matter and anti-matter, they tend to cancel each other out.
But LSD had a certain underground cachet. If alcohol was the Ford Pinto of the drug world (ie, cheap and dangerous), then LSD
was the Lotus Elise (a sensory extravaganza in a very small package). So the next time Dean was a drunken mess and trying to get belligerent with me, I stuck out my metaphorical chest and said,
"I bet you can't do acid without drinking." That seemed to shut him up. He must have experienced, at least once, that sensation when LSD forces you to sit back and assess your life under a microscope.
Joe was another friend. He was very much like Dean's older sister, in that he knew which music was good and which music was just popular drivel. He read Rolling Stone magazine religiously, and each time we went over to his place, he had new vinyl to share. As I look in my CD cabinet today, I can still see his influence: Jeff Beck, 42
Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, the Grateful Dead, Isao Tomita, and on and on. My fondest memory of Joe is of him listening to Isao Tomita's electronic rendition of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. The particular track was the Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks. Joe is sitting back in a recliner and giggling deliriously. His arms and legs are rhythmically flailing against the empty air, in time with the cheeping of the chicks. Dean and I are also laughing deliriously – half at Mussorgsky's chicks and half at Joe. Of course, a little bit of hashish helped to add some levity to the situation.
A few years later, Joe disappeared from the scene. We found out that he had developed schizophrenia. I bumped into him a few years after that, and he mentioned that he was working for the postal service. He seemed OK, but in the decades since, he hasn't been to any of our high school reunions, and of all the friends I used to have, he is the one I'd most like to see again.
According to the Wikipedia entry on schizophrenia, "A number of drugs have been associated with the development of schizophrenia, including cannabis..." The entry also states that genetics plays a factor (so there was likely some schizophrenia somewhere in Joe's family background), and that the prevalence of the disorder in the wider population is about 0.3% to 0.7% .
According to researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York:
"The effects of hallucinogenic drugs resemble some of the core symptoms of schizophrenia. Some atypical antipsychotic drugs were identified by their high affinity for serotonin 5-HT(2A) receptors, which is also the target of LSD-like drugs. "10
So the drugs that Joe uses to keep his condition under check work on the same cell receptors in our bodies that drugs like LSD
work on.
¹⁰ From 2009 Apr;32(4):225‐32. Epub 2009 Mar 5. Psychedelics and schizophrenia.González-Maeso J, Sealfon SC. Department of Psychiatry, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY 10029, USA.
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19269047) 43
This takes us back to the "doors of perception" that William Blake, Aldous Huxley, and Jim Morrison all talked about. As Huxley noted:
"The schizophrenic is like a man permanently under the influence of mescalin, and therefore unable to shut off the experience of a reality which he is not holy enough to live with, which he cannot explain away because it is the most stubborn of primary facts, and which, because it never permits him to look at the world with merely human eyes, scares him into interpreting its unremitting strangeness, its burning intensity of significance, as the manifestations of human or even cosmic malevolence, calling for the most desperate countermeasures, from murderous violence at one end of the scale to catatonia, or psychological suicide, at the other."11
After Joe’s unfortunate circumstance came to light, I thought of an analogy: rusty door hinges. Practices such as meditation and psychedelic drug use may allow us to open the doors of perception, but some people have doors that might be difficult or impossible to close again. Joe was one of those people. He was one of the 0.3% to 0.7% of the population with a genetic heritage that causes huge problems when they mix their Mussorgsky with marijuana or magic mushrooms.
In subsequent years, I dropped LSD perhaps a half dozen times. I also did magic mushrooms a few times, and noticed very little difference in effect between the two drugs. Likewise, with the legal alternatives, such as San Pedro cactus and morning glory seeds.
They were all mild trips. No fantastic visual and auditory hallucinations. No warpage of time. Just a feeling of relaxed alertness, a child-like awareness of the beauty of nature, and an ability to live in the present (instead of obsessing over the next day’s ¹¹
The Doors of Perception. Thinking Ink Limited edition, p.27).
44
deadlines and the previous day’s mistakes). But there were also those moments when my psyche forced me to analyze the questionable path that my life had taken up until then.
Maybe there was a bit of Todd Rundgren to listen to. Maybe a few National Geographics to flip through. And I was fine with that, since the possibility of an unpredictable, high-octane trip was, to tell the truth, a bit unnerving. And in the case of the teeny little microdots, I suspect that the producers thought it wise to distribute recreational dosages, rather than mind blowing ones. If the weekend alcoholics used them to aid in the drainage of their glasses, well so be it.
The effect of psychedelics on me came not only when I was high, however. A huge influence came about via the library and the various used book stores that I wandered through. Merely reading about the relationship between psychedelics and religion and mysticism12 brought about massive changes in my thoughts about what was important in life, and what was not.
I consciously tried to be less of a jerk. The same neighbours who might have once seen me pissing off of the front step of my parents'
house, now saw me walking the family dog up and down the back alley with a home-made poop scoop (made from a broom handle attached to a plastic flower pot). I may have looked like an idiot –
and this was long before scooping poop was the politically correct thing to do – but the neighbours smiled at my efforts and said hello.
And it felt good to say hello back.
Institutions were another matter, though. At that point in my life, I didn't see them as people. So I felt justified in ripping them off...especially if they were large corporations. The exhaust system on my Triumph Spitfire was in perfectly good shape, but it felt good to "stick it to the man". So I secretly stashed away a brand new muffler out back of the warehouse where I picked it up later...not realizing, of course, the ripple effects that such seemingly insignificant acts send into society. Like littering, the effect is not ¹² …with the word “mysticism” simply being defined as religion without the associated dogma, guilt, and rock-hard pews.
45
seen merely as a single Tim Hortons cup covering a tiny patch of grass, but rather as the millionth Tim Horton cup contributing to an expensive eyesore that will cost a tidy bundle of tax money to clean up.
In the cultural arena, I threw a lot of conventions out of the window. I wore a leather jacket with a prohibition sign prohibiting a smaller prohibition sign inside of it. In other words, I was nominally a libertarian...though somewhat conflicted, since on the opposite side of the same jacket, I had painted the PBS logo (my wild Friday evenings had now been given over to watching Washington Week in Review and The McLaughlin Group…while slightly stoned, of course).
I cut my own hair without a mirror. I just
grabbed handfuls here and there and snipped
away with scissors until my head looked like a haystack. However, that only lasted a day
or two. When Mom saw me, she was
mortified, and out came the electric clippers.
If there was one societal convention that I
had trouble throwing out of the window, it was rampant consumerism. I realized that it was an evolutionary dead end (for both my sanity and the planet). But it still had me in its clutches.
There was a beautiful Norton 85013 for sale that screamed "Buy me! Buy me!" I equivocated a bit, but in the end, I gave in.
And then, after a few months, I crashed it. Going around a decreasing radius turn at night, I hit the ditch (I was slightly drunk, it should be noted). To this day, I don't remember the crash...or the ¹³ A British motorcycle reputed to be the hardest of all bikes to kick start.
According to Hilton (who you’ll meet in chapter vi), the South African army would recruit new members into their motorcycle corps with a single test.
The potential recruit was simply told to walk over to a Norton and kick start it to life in one try. Not easy. I found that only way I could do it was to have the bike on its centre-stand, lock my knee, jump up a foot or so, and then wish upon a star that the engine wouldn't kick back. (There was no electric start on the early Nortons).
46
next 12 hours. Dean got me home that night, but the next morning, my sister (Kathy) freaked out when I apparently said "so, you must be my sister."
A few years before that, I managed to put a chunk of connecting rod through the crankcase of my Triumph Spitfire (also while I was slightly drunk, it should be noted).
Crashing a Norton Commando, and destroying the engine on a Triumph Spitfire. These are hugely treasured wheels in the minds of connoisseurs. But since I tended to treat vehicles like I treated people (Tim and Janice come to mind), none of them lasted more than a few months.
47
I began to read more and more on the subjects of mysticism and comparative religion. When I belatedly got my high school diploma, it was a World Religions elective that accompanied Chem 30 and Social Studies 30. And during my first years at university, I took courses on Tibetan Buddhism and Christianity.
I wish I still had my little library, but my habit of constantly moving around dictated that I could own nothing more than what could easily fit in a small storage locker. Books were bought, but they invariably wound up back on the shelves of the used book stores where they came from. So, to reminisce, I am now forced to thumb through something called 501 Must-Read Books, 1 where I at least have a chance to once again see some of my old acquaintances.
Aldous Huxley
Besides The Doors of Perception, Huxley wrote the popular science fiction novel Brave New World. It was meant to be a distopian novel, but when I read it in my teens, I thought it would be a pretty cool place to live. There was a drug called soma, which kept everyone happy, and the sexual activity was universal, free, and
“wonderfully pneumatic”.
At about the same time, I read George Orwell's 1984. It was also a distopian novel, but it was definitely not a cool place to live in. Its drug was called Victory Gin, and it smelled "sickly" and tasted like
"nitric acid". Sex was tolerated, but only as a means to make babies who would grow up in dismal, grey drudgery under the watchful eye of Big Brother .
Years later, I would read Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death, which argued that our present world is much more like Huxley's nightmare than Orwell's. The current analogy for Orwell's world is North Korea, whereas Huxley’s Brave New World is best exemplified by the empty glam and glitter of Las Vegas. The ¹ Published by Bounty Books (London, U.K.) 2006.
48
former enslaves people by brute force; the latter enslaves people by their own addiction to "bread and circuses".2
Huxley died in 1963, on the same day that Kennedy was assassinated. But the year before, he wrote a utopian novel, Island. It was full of references to eastern religious practices and magic mushrooms. Although I agreed with the theme of the book, I found it far too didactic. I much preferred his earlier work, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. It’s about a gazillionaire (supposedly based on the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst…or was it Citizen Kane?…or perhaps Monty Burns?3) growing old and desperately looking for the mythical fountain of youth. Of course, his search is unsuccessful, and it comes at the expense of any realization of what the purpose of life really is.
Carl Jung
Jung was the Swiss psychiatrist who was featured in the movie A Dangerous Method. I hadn't read any of his books when I was younger – and if I did, I likely wouldn't have made it past the first few pages.4 However, I ran into him on a regular basis when reading other books. I constantly came across references to his concepts of the "collective unconscious"5 and "synchronicity".6 So much so, that ² Words used by the Roman poet Juvenal, who lived almost 2,000 years ago, and who mourned the erosion of civic pride among his contemporaries.
³ In the 4th episode of the 5�� season of The Simpsons, Burns recalls from his childhood, a beloved stuffed bear called Bobo. This was based on the 1941
movie Citizen Kane, which, in turn, was loosely based on the life of Hearst.
⁴ Except for his autobiography Memories, Dreams and Reflections, which I read fairly recently, as a result of seeing it mentioned in 501 Must-read Books.
⁵ The notion that there is a vast cultural, psychological and spiritual web unifying humanity's past which underlies our normal reality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_unconscious ⁶ According to wikipedia, "the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance and that are observed to occur together in a meaningful manner." Also known as the 5�� album by the “new wave” rock group, The Police.
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when a documentary about his life came out in 1986, I eagerly went to see it at the local avant-garde theatre (the same theatre where I had attended midnight screenings of Reefer Madness and The Three Stooges while buzzing on pot).
In the film Matter of Heart, I vaguely recall seeing Jung as an old man, on the shore of a Swiss lake, carving intricate designs and inscriptions upon rather large rocks. These rocks formed a large part of his life, since he lived in a small castle, built with his own hands from those same rocks.
Henry David Thoreau
If Jung built and lived in a stone castle by a lake, then Thoreau built and lived in a wooden cabin by a pond. His most well known book, Walden, is about his experience living in a 150 square foot cottage for 2 years, 2 months and 2 days. His aim was "to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life..." The book is also about his thoughts on contemporary society, particularly its emphasis on empty materialism.
I recall reading some of it. Did I read the whole book? Or only a chapter or two? Likely the latter, since as John Updike noted of Walden, "...the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible."
And as I thumb through a copy, I can easily see the unread portions.
Take this, for example:
I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere. Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength.7
This paragraph drones on like that for another eight sentences, all of them essentially just saying “relax folks” (at least I think that’s what he’s saying).
⁷
Walden p.9 from Harper and Row’s series Perennial Classic, 1965 edition.
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I’m being harsh, yes. But it takes a supreme effort to wade through his repetitive and obtuse 19th Century prose. And unlike the proverbial plowboy, who, at the time, could supposedly digest the texts of the Lincoln-Douglas debates with ease, our modern attention spans are much shorter.
But luckily, we get to the meat and potatoes of the book by page 30, where he states “Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall, arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber.” And it was likely page 30 that I skipped over to when I was a teenager, dreaming about getting away from the rat race, spending my time communing with nature, and reading great works of literature.
As it happened, I lucked out. For eleven summers, I worked at remote forest fire look-out towers, searching the horizon for wisps of smoke. I'd read a page, then look around, read a page, then look around again. My office was a tiny cubicle perched on stilts, from which I could see fifty miles in any direction, while a hundred feet below the cubicle, I had a cozy cabin (perhaps twice the size of Thoreau's). So I knew firsthand some of the pleasures that he knew.
Hermann Hesse
Hesse's book Siddhartha was one of the books that Mrs. Wong scolded me for reading in math class. But unlike Walden, I do remember finishing it.
Siddhartha is the fictional biography of a person who meets the historical Buddha. And anytime you have a decent writer (Hesse received the Noble Prize for literature in 1946) writing about an interesting person who lived a long, long time ago (about 500 BC), while using straightforward prose, it becomes hard not to turn the pages.
There was also a movie of the same name, released in 1972, which was filmed in India in suitably exotic locations. As Wikipedia notes, the film shows Siddhartha's experiences with "...harsh asceticism, sensual pleasures, material wealth, then self-revulsion 51
and eventually to the oneness and harmony with himself that he had been seeking." The "sensual pleasures" part of the film was agreeable to me at the time, since the lead female actor had a nude scene. This wasn't received very well by the Indian censors, since at the time, even kissing was banned in Bollywood.
William S. Burroughs
You couldn't have lived through the 1970's without bumping into this guy. A heroin junkie with a long, drawn out drawl, he shot his wife by accident – though even he wondered whether it was really an accident. They were playing a game of William Tell, but instead of an apple, there was a glass of water on her head, and instead of a bow and arrow, he had a revolver that didn't shoot straight, and instead of a Swiss background in archery, he had quite a bit of alcohol flowing through his veins.
I had read one or two of his short stories, but all I remember is his reflections on killing his wife, as well as a classification that he formulated of gunshot wounds (knee-cap, groin, stomach, and chest in some sort of order of gruesomeness and/or mortality and/or pain).
To me, he would have been forgettable, except for the fact that he hung out with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, two of the major influences of the Beat Generation of the 1950's. Kerouac wrote On the Road, a very influential book about traveling light and living life to the fullest. Time magazine rated it as one of the 100 best novels of the 20th century. So I'm astonished that 501 Must-Read Books didn't include Kerouac.
You can pick up a copy of On the Road, randomly flip to just about any page and read one of Kerouac's melodious and enthusiastic descriptions of the many people and places that they came across in their travels. In Los Angeles, for example:
"Wild negroes with bop caps and goatees came laughing by; then long-haired brokendown hipsters straight off Route 66 from New York; then old desert rats carrying packs and heading for a park bench at the Plaza; then Methodist ministers with raveled sleeves, and an occasional Nature Boy saint in beard and 52
sandals. I wanted to meet them all, talk to everybody..."
I wouldn't have minded talking to Kerouac, but I sure would have minded living next to him and his raucous crew. They were partiers and they loved booze and noise. In fact, Kerouac managed to drink himself to death by the age of 47. His closest travelling companion, Neal Cassady, was found in a coma, at the age of 42, on a railroad track in the middle of nowhere. He had overdosed on barbiturates. Ironically, Burroughs, the heroin junkie, lived to see his 83rd birthday. Ginsberg lived to see his 70th. He was the most contemplative of the bunch, and I wouldn't have minded him for a neighbour, except for the fact that he was an unrepentant pederast.8
In some small way, I'm sure that On the Road contributed to my travel bug. But more on that later.
Alexandra David-Neel9
Like Huxley's Doors of Perception, David-Neel's Magic and Mystery in Tibet was such a great influence on me, that just thinking about it three decades later, I am compelled to order a copy online and re-visit the accounts of super-human feats supposedly accomplished by the various Buddhist monks that she met. These were acts such as levitation, generating extraordinary internal body heat in the frozen wastes, and traveling long distances over formidable terrain in very short order. I also recall some of the little details, like Tibetan tea, flavoured with rancid yak butter.
⁸ According to wikipedia, "a sexual relationship between an adult male and an adolescent boy outside his immediate family." common in ancient Greece and Rome. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Ginsberg#Association_with_NAMBLA ⁹
A Belgian-French explorer who managed to get into the closed kingdom of Tibet in 1924, disguised as a pilgrim. At a time when solo travel by females was frowned upon, she managed to go to India in 1890 and Sikkim in 1911.
Still in Sikkim, she lived in a cave from 1914 to 1916, learning about Tibetan Buddhism and meditating. And, remarkably for a European woman at the time, she was twice able to meet the 13�� Dalai Lama.
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Unlike David-Neel’s book, however, a slightly different Tibetan book did manage to survive my various moves from storage locker to storage locker. It is a well-thumbed little gem from Oxford University Press detailing the life of Milarepa (c. 1052 to c. 1135). If Buddha is the Tibetan equivalent of Jesus Christ, then Milarepa might be their Saint Paul. The hagiography goes as follows: Milarepa and his widowed mother suffer at the hands of an evil paternal uncle.
Milarepa learns the black arts, and through fantastic sorcery, wreaks revenge on the paternal side of the family.
Remorse sets in. Enlightenment is not possible when the mind is mired in evil thoughts.
Milarepa finds a teacher of the white arts. Many onerous tasks over many years finally wipes the mental slate clean enough for Milarepa to start on the long road to enlightenment.
Enlightenment is attained. The End.
The English translation uses very colourful language, similar to that of the King James Bible. On the quest for revenge, for example, we hear Milarepa's mother: "What I should like is to see thee dressed in a coat of mail and mounted on a steed, dragging thy stirrups over the necks of these our enemies." Wow! That’s Old Testament stuff, for sure.
On the gastronomic side, I don't recall if there was any mention of rancid yak butter. However, barley is mentioned a lot, being one of the few crops that can thrive on the high Tibetan plateau. Part of Milarepa's revenge consists of directing hail storms (apparently a popular vocation back then) over the barley crops of his enemies.
Even without hail storms though, agriculture was a perilous business: the small field that Milarepa's mother owned was called
"Little Famine Carpet".
The biography of Milarepa is best seen as a mix between the King James Bible and the grimmest of the Brothers Grimm fairy 54
tales. Allegory, irony, and tragedy abound. I was so impressed with the book that, in my early 20's, I spent many hours in my parent's basement with an old manual typewriter, hammering out the first two episodes of a radio play, based on the epic. I was partly successful, in that the CBC Calgary producer liked what he read.
However, the terse answer from CBC Toronto was "we don't do epics".
Along with allegory, irony and tragedy, there is likely a bit of hyperbole (directing hail storms, perhaps?). Part of the problem is that science tends to raise inconvenient questions. But another problem is that biographies are sometimes written many years after the person being written about has ceased to walk the earth. For example, the earliest gospel in the New Testament (Mark) was written about thirty years after the crucifixion of Christ. And the earliest biographer of Milarepa wrote his account at least 300 years after that saint attained nirvana.
But that's no reason to dismiss either the gospels or the account of Milarepa. Fantastic literary details tantalize us, and they add flavour to those fundamental kernels of wisdom.
Thomas Merton
In my early years, I came across Merton haphazardly: a stray mention here and there, and at least one TV documentary. He was a Trappist monk who was noted for his open-minded approach to other religions. In fact, he happened to be at a conference of Christian and Buddhist monks in Thailand, when he reached out from his hotel bathtub to adjust an electric fan and was electrocuted.
His name is often associated with another author who tried to understand the commonalities of the different world religions: Alan Watts, who was a Harvard lecturer, radio commentator, Episcopalian10 priest, and Buddhist Zen master. He was quite a bit more unorthodox than Merton. He wrote books with strange titles, ¹⁰ Derived from the Anglican Church, and similar to the United Church of Canada, in that its doctrines are fairly liberal.
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such as The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.
And he experimented with mescaline and LSD.
As for his thoughts on psychedelic drugs, Watts said, "When you get the message, hang up the phone." In other words, when you have received the wisdom from a mescaline trip (for example), it makes no sense to take it again and again and again, as if it were a carnival ride. This is somewhat similar to the advice of Albert Hofmann, who said that it's really only necessary to clean the cobwebs out of your brain once every five years or so.
I was sure I had read Watts’ autobiography many years ago. But had I really? As I now read through a recently acquired copy, I suspect that perhaps I hadn't. I suspect it was one of the many books on my various cinder block and plywood shelving units that became
“ten percenters”. All through my life, I've generally only ever read about ten percent of any book that I've picked up...except for a small number (also around ten percent) which have been so captivating that I've actually gone through and read the whole thing from cover to cover.
Robert Hughes
Hughes’ The Fatal Shore was definitely not a ten percenter. It’s all about Australia’s experience as a penal colony in the 18th and 19th centuries, and it is one of the few books that I enthusiastically raced through in just a few days
Yes, ancient penal colonies are fascinating – and I highly recommend that you read Hughes’ book, if you get a chance – but I really wanted to mention it in connection with a whole bunch of other similar historical books that I’ll affectionately called “misery porn”. On my bookshelf at the moment, examples include Robert Graves Goodbye To All That (about life in the trenches in WWI), John Keegan’s The Face of Battle (military life both in and out of the trenches throughout history), Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man (life in a Nazi death camp), Enda Delaney’s The Great Irish Famine, and Juliet Gardiner’s Wartime Britain 1939-1945.
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Do you see the pattern? These are all books that, among other things, show what real misery is. And why is that important? It’s vitally important because it shows you and I how insanely lucky we are to be living at this particular time in history.
OK, I realize that misery didn’t only reside in the past – as the average Haitian or Syrian can easily attest to. But I also know that I’m not currently starving or being tortured, and I assume that you aren’t either.
The important message, therefore, is that we need to quit whining. For example, only a fool would complain about the price of gasoline, when it currently costs less than Perrier water, and when a mere cupful of the stuff is able to propel a 4,000 pound cage of metal and glass at a dizzying speed for several miles.
If society ever crumbles, it will be the whiners and the fools who will turn out to be our biggest burdens. So if you know any of these folks, be proactive, and point them towards a copy of Juliet Gardiner’s book or Robert Graves’ book. Then maybe they’ll figure out how much they have to be thankful for. And they might also begin to appreciate what our ancestors were able to accomplish under the absolute worst of circumstances.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Are there any other books that mightily influenced my world view as a young man, but which, for whatever reason, 501 Must-Read Books didn’t see fit to introduce to the world? Yes, there is: The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1970. I find it utterly incomprehensible that 501 MRB missed this guy. Time magazine called it the "best non-fiction book of the twentieth century". And I have to agree.
His trilogy about the Gulag comprises more than 1,900 pages of misery, caused by unspeakable cruelty in the Stalinist penal camps of Soviet Russia. 1,900 pages! And I, just out of my teens, made it half way through the lot! How rare is that? A dense book with tiny print and a few grainy photos of long-dead Russians was able to 57
compete with Happy Days, Three’s Company, The Gong Show and…OK, so maybe it’s not so far-fetched after all.
The horror was appalling. I can recall a few of worst atrocities.
Imagine being strapped to a massive log at the top of a steep hill, and then having a Soviet boot send the log tumbling down to the bottom. The result was nothing less than hamburger. And the torture.
The secret police knew exactly how to make any male sign a confession without leaving a trace on his body: they just placed a boot on a testicle…and gradually increased the pressure.
Solzhenitsyn was writing about the 1940's and 1950's, but even after Khrushchev denounced Stalin in the 1960's, it was evident that Brezhnev was maintaining much of the brutality in the 1970's and 1980's. According to historian Robert Service, there were still about 10,000 political and religious prisoners living in terrible conditions during his tenure.
Meanwhile, there was a Lada dealership in Calgary in the early 1980's. Sure, I had heard all the Lada jokes,11 but I wasn't laughing; I was seething. I fantasized about sneaking into the dealership at night with a few cans of spray paint and reminding people where these vehicles came from. But I didn't. No nerves, I guess.
A few years later, I was washing dishes with a Pole by the name of Joseph. I had brought in a book detailing the various camps still across the USSR, and we were taking a few minutes away from our scrubbing to look through it. But just then, the manager of the ¹¹ A man goes into a car shop and says to the assistant "Can I have a hub cap for my Lada?" The assistant thinks for a moment and replies "Okay, it seems a fair swap.”
"Why is the Lada's rear window heated?
So the hands of the people pushing it will not freeze.
Did you know that the Lada's instruction book contains 500 pages?
There are two pages with information about the car and 498 pages with bus and train timetables.
For many more, go to: http://www.webtolife.co.nz/content/lada-jokes 58
restaurant briskly walked into the kitchen with his permanently etched frown, and came over to us. "What is it?", he muttered. He must have thought that we were looking at car magazines or underground comics or something. But when he saw the book, he just said "Hmm. Good. Very good." in a subdued voice. He had what sounded like an eastern European accent.
I later told Joseph that we should totally boycott the USSR.
"No", he replied quietly, still scrubbing away at a pot, "I don't believe in using food as a weapon." I sometimes think that due to the mere fact that decades later, I can still recall his statement, perhaps some tiny morsel of his wisdom had rubbed off on me.
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At various times, I headed out west to the mountains. It was not so much in the spirit of Jack Kerouac, as it was in the spirit of a wannabe hippie who was born a decade too late. Whereas Kerouac travelled for the sake of travel, I was more interested in a destination. Whereas Kerouac and his buddies would often get drunk in a bar or a flophouse or in the middle-class home of an unfortunate relative of an acquaintance, I would travel with a sleeping bag and a pup tent. Kerouac was looking for whatever experiences might come his way. I was looking for something specific: either a hippie commune or a Buddhist monastery…or a field full of magic mushrooms.
I had four modes of travel: bus, bicycle, motorcycle and hitch-hiking.
A typical bus trip would take me out to Vancouver. From there, I might take a ferry over to one of the islands, or perhaps north to the Sunshine Coast. With my backpack full of essentials, I would usually walk an insane distance to find a campsite, and then upon arrival, question my sanity. Of course, I would always be on the lookout for the mythical Mother Lode of magic mushrooms. But I never found any. So I would pack up the following morning, walk the insane distance back to the nearest corner store, gobble down a cold can of beans, and get the series of buses back to the comfort of my parents' house in Calgary.
A typical motorcycle trip would have many of the same features...with the addition of extremely cold fingers. I drove a Honda XL185, which although being very reliable, had an engine that was literally 1/10th the size of many of the touring bikes that one sees these days.
I still remember some frosty nights at the higher altitude campsites in my flimsy sleeping bag. Too cold to sleep, except for the last hour or two, when fatigue finally overcame the chill. Perhaps a quick dream or two, featuring scenes set roughly at room temperature, but then it was time to fold up the frost-laden tent, and hit the meandering highway again.
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Somehow,1 I heard about the Yasodhara Ashram nestled in the woods near Kootenay Bay. So I took the bus to Creston, and started walking north with my thumb out. I had on my old army greatcoat, which was woolly and warm, but also ridiculously heavy and quite prone to soaking up rainwater. In my back-pack, I had a pup tent and sleeping bag, as well as a candle lantern, and enough toiletries to make myself somewhat presentable.
At the time, I was reading The Way of A Pilgrim, 2 which was written by an anonymous Russian some time between 1853 and 1861. The book is about his wanderings across the vast land, and about the results of his interpretation of Thessalonians 5:17, which states that one should "pray without ceasing". So that's what I was doing:
"Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner. Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner. Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner...." And so on. I was making my way towards a Hindu ashram, while reciting the "Jesus Prayer".
Even at that point, however, I had read enough about brain chemistry to know that the effect on my consciousness would have been much the same whether I was reciting the Jesus Prayer or immersing myself in endless repetitions of "mango chutney, beware the Ides of March". Contemplatives have known for millennia that repetitive stimuli alters consciousness. Whether that involves chanting a single syllable, staring at a mandala, observing one's breath going in and out, or simply living in a cave, the results have been similar. If practiced with enough diligence, the adherent is often able to shed the veil and begin to apprehend those realities ¹ I often wonder how I found out about anything – let alone an ashram in the middle of nowhere – in that strange era before the internet. Perhaps a notice in a health food store?...or in a New Age bookstore?
² Not a totally obscure book. J.D. Salinger (author of Catcher in the Rye) featured it prominently in another book titled Franny and Zooey…though that wasn’t how I found out about it.
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which normally remain hidden from our day-to-day consciousness.
But the words did have some value. At that point in my life, I was very much aware of sin, especially in St. Paul's sense of the sins of omission.3 I could do better. I could eat healthier food. I could meditate, do yoga, anything. But the willpower needed to do the really boring stuff was lacking. I could read stacks of books on the tough spiritual practices, but I couldn't sit still for ten minutes. So the repetition of the word "sinner" was a good reminder that I wasn't perfect.
And then there was desire. With respect to women, Jimmy Carter famously mentioned it in the November, 1976 issue of Playboy. But since I was young and full of hormones, I wasn't too worried about that aspect of it. I was more concerned about my desire for material things and how I still hadn't really learned much since my childhood epiphany about the Hot Wheels set. Biblical admonishments about moths and rust and “doth corrupt” could not hope to compete with the sweet rumble of a ‘72 Norton.
And Jesus Christ? Even back then, my professed dictum was to neither believe nor disbelieve...in anything. The key was to rely solely on experience, if that was possible. But there was historical evidence for Jesus. And I had filled my mind with stacks of books that went on and on about purported miracles in both the eastern and western traditions. So I was quite ready to accept that an ancient Jewish carpenter had somehow acquired powers which weren’t readily recognized by the laws of classical physics. And I was quite ready to accept that somehow my repetitions might be heard. I just wasn't going to bet my sanity on it.
A young fellow in a battered old pick-up truck pulled up and gave me a ride. He knew the exact timetable of the daily RCMP
patrol along the road, so he wasn't too concerned about the speed limit. And I'm not sure whether it came from him or myself, but we shared a toke or two of pot.4 When we got to his parents' acreage, ³ From Romans 7:19 he states "For the good that I would, I do not..." Or as Martin Luther King said: "In the end we will not remember the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
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they gave me a big square of carrot cake and I went back out to the road and continued to stick my thumb out.
"Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner. Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner. Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner..."
A short while later, a big family in an even bigger station wagon stopped to pick me up. We chatted and I told them that I was headed to a Hindu ashram up the road. And being Born Again Christians, they also told me where I was headed...but in a fairly diplomatic manner. I mentioned that my father was a United Church minister in Calgary. We talked about theology. We probably talked about theology all the way to Kootenay Bay, since at that point in my life, it was one of my favourite topics. And it was always interesting to try and figure out what – if anything – turned people on, spiritually.
The father must have sensed that I was a sincere searcher, since when we got to the end of the line, he turned to me, and with tears welling up in his eyes, asked if I'd be willing to accept Jesus into my heart. I thought to myself, "Um, yeah! I've been asking him to come into my heart all effing morning, dude!" But I just nodded my head nonchalantly and said "yes, of course I would". I don't remember what was said after that, but we parted amicably, the vast gulf intact between his belief and my yearning for experience.
I found out later that he had phoned my dad to let him know where I was and where I was headed...in both senses of the word.
There was a substantial walk to the ashram, which was nestled back in the woods. Of course, the place was idyllic, like much of rural British Columbia. But when I entered the bookshop, I quickly realized that this wasn't like the typical ashram in India or monastery in Tibet. I couldn't just present myself at the door and offer to chop ⁴ If it was mine, it would have been imported Colombian; if it was his, it likely would have been homegrown pot from Colombian seeds. This was in the early 1980's, when you had to smoke half a joint to really get high. And Colombian was actually the new kid on the block, having twice the strength of the old Mexican crap we smoked in the ‘70s…though both of them were still much, much weaker than the specialized varieties available today.
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wood and carry water and then, in the early hours of each morning, sit still while observing my breath. This was a business, where people who were vastly wealthier than I, could come and take yoga courses, and then return to so-called civilization in a better frame of mind. But I looked around the shop anyway, where I bought a copy of Leary, Metzner and Alpert's5 psychedelic version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.6
On the walk back to Kootenay Bay, I spied a vacant spot in the woods to pitch my tent. So, after reading a few pages of Leary, Metzner and Alpert by candlelight, I nodded off into a deep sleep.
The next day, I hitch-hiked back down the road to Creston. But since my grand quest to chop wood, carry water, and observe my breath merely resulted in a book, I boarded the next Greyhound back to Calgary.
On another westward mushroom quest, I hitched a ride with Dan.
We were just getting to the top of Roger's Pass on a beautiful Wednesday morning, when we noticed the RCMP had a bunch of semi's pulled over (probably looking for unsafe brakes, since westbound traffic had some fairly steep grades to look forward to).
But they pulled us over as well. And as luck would have it, I was driving, and the old cop brazenly reached over and stuck his hand in my shirt pocket. Not a good place to hide a small bag of dope, as it turned out.
"Have you got any more of that hidden away?"
"No."
"Would you tell me if you did?"
⁵ Timothy Leary (who we met previously), Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert (who we’ll meet in Chapter XIV).
⁶ The Tibetan Book of the Dead, according to Wikipedia, is “…intended to guide one through, the experiences that the consciousness has after death, in the bardo, the interval between death and the next rebirth.”
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"Probably not."
"OK, well I guess we'll have to tear your car apart, then."
He then got his younger partner to do the search, and he eventually found our main stash: an ounce of Columbian and a couple of small vials of hash oil. But he must've either been blind or sympathetic, since he left us one of the vials.
Anyway, we continued on to Vancouver Island, where we camped at Strathcona Provincial Park. We did find some mushrooms growing on rotting logs, but the stems didn't turn blue when we broke them (which would have indicated the real deal), and we didn't get very high when we dried them and smoked them.
A few months later, we appeared in a Revelstoke courtroom to plead guilty and pay our $75 fine. Five years later, our names were erased from the Canadian naughty list. Thirty years later – after getting precisely zero information from the Department of Homeland Security at the Calgary Airport – I experimentally drove across the border and found out that my name apparently wasn't on Uncle Sam's naughty list either…though I guess if this book ever sees the light of day…
I had always done a lot of cycling. I rode my first 2-wheeler on the rudimentary sidewalks and gravel roads in Hythe. Then, in Fort St. John, I graduated to asphalt and a banana seat bike with ape-hanger handlebars (just like Peter Fonda in Easy Rider!). In Calgary, I got serious with a beat up old Raleigh that had drop-handlebars and a rear derailleur (just like Eddie Merckx in the Tour de France!).
And finally, due to my first full-time job (washing dishes), I was able to buy a shiny new unit with rear and front derailleurs, toe clips, and pannier racks (just like…um, Dervla Murphy?7).
⁷ A woman who, in 1963, cycled solo from London to Delhi, via Iran and Afghanistan, with not much more than a small pistol and a helluva lot of guts.
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I packed lightly, taking a 3-season sleeping bag and a bivy sack.
And for food, I had little more than trail mix and water. A few light layers of clothing and a gore-tex anorak, and I was ready to go.
I didn't get very far. Less than twenty miles outside of Calgary, I pulled off the highway by an overpass to munch on some trail mix.
And as I walked the bike over towards the shaded concrete head-slope, one of the tires managed to clip a sharp piece of metal that was barely sticking out of the grass. If it was a normal flat tire, I could have fixed it there and then. But the shard had ripped a huge gash out of the sidewall, so I was stuck.
Now I had no choice but to stick my thumb out again. So I flicked the quick-release hub, took off the front wheel, and hauled my bike back out to the shoulder. Luckily, only a few minutes passed before a car stopped. It was a small car, and the young female driver had a quite a load packed into it already. But somehow we managed to stuff my bike in there as well. She was a student, heading back home to B.C. after a term at the U. of C. And as we wound our way through the mountains, the chatter ranged from her allergy to bees (which she had a healthy fear of), to her time in the Church of Scientology (which she also had a healthy fear of).
She let me off at Radium Hot Springs, where I camped in a pine forest overlooking the small town. In the morning, I walked the bike down to the nearest hardware store and found an oversized tire that sort of fit. Then I was back on the road. It was full of twists and turns, and long stretches where the shoulder was practically non-existent, but I must have made fairly good time, since my next memory was of the much larger town of Cranbrook, 150 kilometres to the south.
The cheapo tire that I picked up in Radium was a good excuse to shorten the forthcoming miles. So I decided that I'd take the bus to Vancouver, where there would be some upscale bicycle shops with decent lightweight tires. Luckily, the bus station at Cranbrook wasn't too far from a mattress store, which served double duty. Out back, there were lots of mattress shaped cardboard boxes, which were just the right size to stuff my partially disassembled bike into. Once that was all taped up, I then used a second mattress box to crawl into and 66
wait until the the wee hours of the morning, when the next Greyhound was supposed to arrive.
It was cold. Too cold to sleep, but also too cold to get out of the box and dig in the first box to retrieve my sleeping bag. It was one of those many episodes when I had to keep telling myself that the present discomfort would inevitably end, and that I'd soon be basking in the pleasant warmth of the future.
And sure enough, it wasn't long before I found myself gazing out of the window of a Greyhound bus, with the warm Okanagan sun shining in. And a few hours after that, I was in Vancouver, where I managed to find a decent tire at a decent bike shop. Dusk arrived soon after, so I settled down for the night on an abandoned railroad siding in an old industrial area.
The next morning, I headed to the nearest market to stock up on more trail mix, and once again, the modest little duffel bags strapped to the pannier racks bulged out between the bungee cords.
Leaving the market, I sensed that I was being followed by another cyclist. And after a while, he pulled up beside me.
"Hi there! You seem to be keeping up a pretty good pace."
"Yeah, well, I don't have a lot of extra weight. I guess that's why." (His bike had large, bulging pannier bags, front and rear, plus a handlebar bag and a mountain of stuff on top of the rear rack).
His name was Ed, and he was from New York City. And although he had taken the train to Chicago, he had cycled the rest of the way to the west coast. His legs were like tree trunks.
"Where are you headed?"
"I'm not sure. Why?"
"A bunch of us have found a decent spot at the old shipyards.
You're welcome to join us if you'd like."
Sure enough, there was a sheltered spot on a raised wooden platform in the midst of ancient marine desolation. Some of the 67
others had cooking utensils and small naptha stoves, so we shared what we had, and then talked into the night.
The next morning, Ed and I headed north. First, across Burrard Inlet, and then on to a ferry for the quick trip over to Vancouver Island. We landed in Nanaimo, where sterile shopping malls dominated the landscape. So we headed south to Victoria, noted for its Old English pubs and ivy-covered stone walls. We made good time. The weather was glorious, the traffic was sparse and the shoulders were wide. It was a bit of a huff going up the Malahat Pass, but we sped down the other side almost as quickly as the folks in their “cages”. And before we knew it, we were in downtown Victoria, signing in at the youth hostel.
The next day, we were on to another ferry, this time to Port Angeles in Washington State. From there, we headed east, enjoying more great weather and lots of twisty, hilly roads through tiny rural farming communities. My main memory here was the realization that when cycling 100 or 200 kilometres per day, synthetic underwear works on the crotch in a manner not unlike sandpaper.
(Note to self: get cotton underwear at the nearest available department store.)
At one particularly lush spot, sandwiched between the Olympic Mountains and Puget Sound, we found a shady campground with lots of tall evergreens. I had my bivy sack, but Ed apparently had survived his continental trek with nothing more than a tube tent.8 In any event, there was no rain and no mosquitoes with which to test the relative merits of our shelters.
The next morning, we continued on south. But it wasn't too far into the journey before I decided to test a theory of mine. So I bid farewell and good luck to Ed, and I once again took the front wheel off of my bike and stuck out my thumb.
The theory was validated. Within minutes, a vehicle stopped. It was a camper van driven by a little old lady.
⁸ A tube of plastic sheeting that is held up by a rope, usually strung between two trees. It is invariably described as an "emergency shelter".
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"Is something wrong with your bike?"
"No, I’m just hitch-hiking with it; that’s all."
"Oh. OK. Well, let's get your bike in the back. I'm just going to visit my son down near Eugene." She was a retired school teacher, so after an extended chat about geography and literature (while watching 300 kilometres fly past the windows), she let me off by an inter-change and we wished each other a great day.
Another few minutes passed. Another vehicle stopped. This time, it was a massive old boat driven by a similarly massive community college instructor. That got me as far as a state operated campsite that was not too far north of the California border. So I had come nearly 700 kilometres in one day.
Early the next morning, the sun was already beating down relentlessly. My first benefactor was a salesman in a VW micro-bus.
It had no air conditioning, and so we had all of the windows cranked open. We made good time, even though part of it was spent in reverse, scanning the road-side vegetation for critical receipts that periodically flew out of the VW’s windows.
At the end of that ride, I decided to do a quick dog-leg to the west and hit the ocean. But this time, I re-attached the front wheel and resumed pedaling. It was tremendously exhilarating, being able to see and hear the breakers of the Pacific Ocean as I gradually ticked off more south-bound miles.
However, after a few hours, the thrill wore off, and I started sticking my thumb out again. This time, the ride was from a college student in a Datsun 280Z. We continued winding along the coast road until we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, and where I finally found myself (spatially, not spiritually) in the fabled hippie mecca.
Hippies were nowhere to be seen, but there were hills…lots of them.
And they weren’t kind to bicycles. But there were also parks…beautiful parks. So that evening, I found a hedge to give a bit of shelter and privacy to the bivy sack.
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The following day, I cycled back over the Golden Gate and headed west towards the Marin Headlands Youth Hostel. I remember a road full of twists and turns, some expensive sports cars taking advantage of those twists and turns, and a sign over the hostel toilet, reading: "If it's brown, flush it down. If it's yellow, let it mellow."
The next day, I continued along the windy road and found the Green Gulch Zen Center. It was a little piece of paradise with footpaths and lush vegetation. Like my expectation of the Yasodhara Ashram, I was thinking that I could just walk in and ask to chop wood, carry water and observe my breath while sitting in a pretzel-like pose. But once again, I only had to enter the registration center to see that this wasn't the right place for a penniless wanderer (OK, I still had a few dollars in my pocket – but probably not enough for bus fare back to Canada).
So I decided to try Berkeley, which was a quick trip across the bay. There were more hills, and there was another night in the bivy sack (this time, curled up in a dusty rural ditch somewhere out towards the Lawrence Livermore Lab, where guys with slide-rules spent their time designing nuclear warheads).
The next morning, I found myself at the hotbed of revolutionary fervor: the University of California, Berkeley. I was ten years too late for the fiery protests, and five years too late for the kidnapping of Patty Hearst.9 But U.C. Berkeley did have a library. And that library did have back-issues of a magazine called Communities. And I knew from haunting the alternative bookstores back in Calgary, if you wanted to find hippies, then Communities was the best place to start. In each issue, they had full listings of all of the communes and co-ops in North America.
⁹ A truly weird saga where the grand‐daughter of the gazillionaire featured in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan gets kidnapped by Robin Hood wannabees, and then joins them in a series of bank robberies and attempted assassinations of police officers. These days, she gets ribbons for showing those ugly little Shih Tzus at dog shows. (For the best overview, check out Jeffrey Toobin’s book: American Heiress. ) 70
What I found was an entry for the nearby Ohmega Salvage (a wood salvage cooperative). So I excitedly left the library and made my way down to San Pablo Avenue, where I found an open lot, surrounded by a high wooden fence. And inside the lot was an acre or so of stacked timber, window frames and bathtubs. Old bathtubs.
The kind that were perched up on four "claw feet" and which were often seen in old western movies (with lots of bubbles if Stella Stevens was in one, or cold, greasy water if the occupant was Ernest Borgnine).
"People pay really good money for those", said Chuck, the lanky Afro-American behind the till. I mentioned that I had seen Ohmega Salvage listed in the Communities magazine.
"Do you need any new members?"
"Oh, possibly. How ‘bout if you stop by the warehouse after work and meet the rest of the gang?"
The warehouse was just that: an old warehouse that had been divided up into smaller sleeping, cooking and eating areas. Part of it was left open, and a climbing rope was suspended from the 2-story ceiling.
I was introduced to the diverse bunch. Vito and Victoria were the patriarch and matriarch. Vito looked like an old hippie who had been left out in the sun too long. He had a smoker's rasp and a friendly chuckle. Victoria had coke bottle glasses, but her eyesight was good enough to make a decent living with her artwork (about which I can't remember a thing). There were two white South African brothers.
Hilton was the younger, and his artwork I can remember very clearly. It was composed of extremely tiny dots of ink painstakingly arranged so that when viewed from a few feet away, they formed a conventional black and white image. One image was taken from the famous Eddie Adams photo of a South Vietnamese general executing a Vietcong prisoner at close range. Hilton was the introvert. His older brother, Leon was the extrovert. He rolled his own cigarettes and occasionally inserted some pot in with the tobacco. He always offered me a puff, but my natural aversion to 71
nicotine10 was such that I could never inhale enough without getting more nauseous than high. Sandy was Leon's girlfriend. She was attractive, friendly and had piercing blue eyes. Richard was scruffy and quiet. He was always the first to volunteer to do the dirty jobs.
When we later had to rip asbestos out of the walls at the worksite, it was he who donned the face mask and the haz-mat suit in the hot sun. Tony had long, dark hair and an equally long beard. He was a dead ringer for Rasputin and he always wore the same pair of pants with a huge rip up the back side (and no underwear). Sandy occasionally offered to sew them up for him (not for his sake, but for ours), but he always politely refused. And finally, there was Shitty and Pissy, the two lovable German Shepherds who never got walked (and thus earned their names by doing their duty in the warehouse).
Somehow, the group decided that I should be given a chance to join the co-op. That meant that I would be allowed to tag along to the work site for a short probation period.
Early the next morning, after bulking up on milk and granola with raisins, a bunch of us piled into an ancient Chevy Suburban and an equally ancient 5-ton dump truck, and we headed off to Treasure Island.11 The group had already been tearing apart an old naval barrack for a month or more. It was three stories high and the flooring was all oak tongue-and-groove planks. It was the oak that we were mainly after, since it fetched a mighty fine dollar back at Chuck's salvage yard.
Our main tools were nail pullers and small, padded platforms on shopping cart wheels that we sat on as we scooted our butts across the oak flooring. The roof and walls of the third floor were already gone as we attacked the flooring, so at any moment, we could catch our breath, look up and see the most marvellous panorama: Alcatraz ¹⁰ Once, Dean and Sam and I went on a camping trip with the primary goal of getting hooked on cigarettes. I was the only one who was unable to accomplish the task.
¹¹ Treasure Island is a 0.9 square mile artificial island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Originally built for the 1939 World's Fair, it became a naval base during World War II. It is accessible via the Oakland Bay Bridge, which links Oakland and San Francisco.
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over to the far right, then the Golden Gate, then San Francisco, and finally over to the Oakland Bay bridge on the left. On one unforgettable day, we were blessed with a flotilla of tall ships entering the harbour.
I guess I worked hard enough and learned fast enough on that first day, since the rest of the crew decided that I could stick around.
In the weeks and months ahead, others weren't so lucky. A recovering heroin addict with a dog that could climb ladders lasted just a week or two. Then there was a Vietnamese fellow who seemed to fit in well...until Sandy alleged that he purposely dropped a nail on her – point first – from the third floor. She was on the second, and just happened to look up at the precise moment that it hit her on the forehead. Doink! She showed us the indentation afterward.
The next day, I went to the Army and Navy store and picked up some cheap work clothes. One of them was a khaki jacket, the back of which seemed to be a blank canvas. So I picked up some acrylic markers and wrote in large letters "READ ABOUT PSYCHEDELIC
DRUGS AT YOUR LOCAL PUBLIC LIBRARY" (the word
"psychedelic" was written with the full rainbow spectrum of colours). I knew how my mind was opened in this way, and I wanted others to have the same experience. I wore it around for months after that, and I only ever had one stranger comment on it. "Why should we read about psychedelic drugs?" he asked. "Because it's an extremely important subject" I answered. "Oh" was about all he said, perhaps sensing the evangelical fervour that might erupt if he stuck with the topic.
I continued along my book reading path, but only because I was able to get a California ID card. Perfectly legitimate; I just showed the authorities my Alberta
driver's license, and within a
week or so, I was able to
use their card to get a
library card.
Life was rather sedate at
the co-op. In the three
months I was there, I only
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recall one party – and a fairly quiet one at that. No loud music and no complaints from the neighbours. This was even though the infamous Wavy Gravy12 and various other members of the Hog Farm13 were in attendance. I shook his hand and said hi, but at the time, I was just barely aware of his historic significance.
Pot was not floating around too freely at the co-op, so I had to go out and find my own. This generally went OK, except when I made the acquaintance of a dealer with the charming name of "Blood". He took my money and said that he'd be right back with the dope. And of course you know what didn't happen next. Luckily, I was warned by some of the local kids that it probably wasn't a very good idea to go looking for Mr. Blood.
There was a TV room at the co-op. Actually, it was more like a crawl space – about 100 square feet with a ceiling so low that even I had to crouch when entering. The TV was in the crawl space because it was banned from the other living areas. It was thought to be too distracting. Perhaps so. Have you ever met a TV that wasn't distracting? It distracted me. I was especially distracted by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which began on Christmas Eve that year.
Evenings were spent in the crawl space, watching with increasing ¹² Wavy Gravy is perhaps most famous for being the MC at the Woodstock music festival in 1969. He is also a clown...really. He became a clown both for reasons of artistic expression and also due to the fact that clowns tend to be arrested less often at political demonstrations. His name was given to him by BB King at the Texas International Pop Festival in 1969. He said that it has worked out well for him, except when talking to telephone operators. With them, he has to say: "Gravy. First initial: W". For more on his life, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavy_Gravy
¹³ America's longest running hippie commune. They went to the Woodstock festival, thinking that they had been assigned the task of building fire pits and trails and assembling a kitchen. However, when they arrived, they found out that they were also signed up to provide security for the event. Taking the new task in stride, they called themselves the "Please Force", hoping to maintain order by stating "Please don't do that; Please do this instead." When asked what kind of tools they would use to enforce order, Wavy Gravy said
"cream pies and seltzer bottles." For more on the Hog Farm, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hog_Farm
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trepidation the lines of tanks crossing the border from the north. I was fairly certain that World War III was just around the corner.14
We were free to work as many days per week as we wanted at the co-op, just as long as we could pay the rent and a share of the groceries. I started out working five days a week, but after a while, four days looked increasingly inviting. I could still afford the occasional joint, and the occasional Playboy magazine, and the library books and the TV signals were free, so I was comfortable.
Sometimes, I even went down to three days a week. I don't remember what I filled the other four days with, but it certainly wasn't with watercolour paintings of the bay or trying out for the local soccer team.
At some point, I voiced the complaint that grocery money was being used to buy the occasional bottle of wine...and meat. (I was a vegetarian). Why should I have to pay money out of my sweat for something that I didn't drink or eat? My whining might have died a merciful death, were it not for the fact that Sandy supported my right to complain. Surely, the co-op could adjust the financial arrangements a bit so that I wouldn't have to support other people's habits.
But adjustment wasn't on the menu. One day, not long after, Vito called a meeting. The co-op was to be disbanded. Wow! There wasn't a lot of discussion. Vito just said that things weren't working ¹⁴ I’ve always been a pessimist. Luckily, though, I’ve also always been wrong…so far. WWIII didn’t happen. Peak oil didn’t materialize like I feared…though peak conventional oil occurred back in 2005. A successful attack on one of the North American electrical grids hasn’t happened…though the U.S. Energy Secretary, Jennifer Granholm, recently stated that the Russians and Chinese do have the capability to take them out. The climate hasn’t irreversibly changed…though I suspect we’ll have to meddle with geoengineering to ensure it doesn’t. And the G7 nations are all still democratic…though the Trump family is trying its best to change that.
The only thing I’m somewhat optimistic about is that it seems possible that advanced civilizations might not always destroy themselves. I’m referring to the recent anomalous footage from U.S. Navy pilots of UAP’s (unidentified aerial phenomena).
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out. And everyone else seemed resigned to the inevitable. Richard was going to head back east, where his home was. Leon and Hilton had only so much time left on their visas, so they weren't sure what to do. Sandy had family in the area, and Tony's inscrutable Rasputin face said nothing.
I went back to my room and pondered my options. Hmm. What options? Best to go back to Canada. After all, World War III could be just around the corner. So, the next day, I gathered my belongings and got Leon and Hilton to give me a ride to the bus station (I left them my bicycle). Luckily, I had enough change to see me back to Calgary.
It wasn't long after that, however, when I had an introspective moment. Even before the bus crossed back into Canada, I realized, once again, that I had been a jerk. And I mused about a scenario in which Leon and Hilton arrived back at the warehouse, the smiles came back out, and everyone rejoiced that the ruse had worked.
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chapter vi : dreadlocks and tattoos
Dreadlocks? Well, no. My hair in the mid-1980's was "jetta", something identical in form to the Jamaican dreadlocks, but a world away from it in concept. Jetta is the matted hair that Hindu holy men (sadhus) and women (sadvis) sometimes wear. According to Wikipedia, it is
"...an expression of
their disregard for
profane vanity, as
well as a symbol of
their spiritual
understanding that
physical
appearances are
unimportant."
Symbolically, it is
depicted as being
worn by the god
Shiva, where it
serves to soak up
the seasonal
floodwaters of the
Ganges River.
The
Rastafarians, on
the other hand,
take their cue from
the Old Testament1
story of Samson and Delilah, where Samson's phenomenal strength was derived from his long hair. I guess it was taken seriously back then, since his enemies, the Philistines, bribed his girlfriend Delilah to cut it off. Back to the 98 pound weakling, he was subsequently blinded and put in shackles. But the Philistines, being the biblical ¹ Numbers, Chapter 6, Verse 5: "All the days of the vow of his separation there shall no razor come upon his head: until the days be fulfilled, in the which he separateth himself unto the LORD, he shall be holy, and shall let the locks of the hair of his head grow."
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yokels, forgot about the fact that hair grows back. And the rest is history...well, sort of.
The Rastafarians are sorta cool. They smoke pot. They tend towards vegetarianism. They don't drink alcohol. They have wild hair. Their music (reggae) has a hypnotic beat and lyrics that sometimes approach Shakespearean profundity. But in other ways, they're yokels, just like the Philistines. Like all biblical literalists, they're homophobic. And they believe that an Ethiopian monarch from the last century was an incarnation of God. When asked about it, the monarch (Haile Selassie) simply said, "who am I to disturb their belief?"
So what's crazier? A semi-feudal emperor as an incarnation of God? Or a god whose hair soaks up the Ganges River? I preferred the latter, but in truth, a large part of my reason for growing jetta simply went back to the phrase above: "...spiritual understanding that physical appearances are unimportant." I wanted people to know that I wasn't brainwashed by society. Of course I was brainwashed by society (and still am), but supposedly not quite as much as those folks who were addicted to the canned laughter of TV sit-coms or the grand spectacle of professional sports.2
So, at some point, I just quit combing my hair. I still washed it on a regular basis, but as the reggae musician, Keith Hudson sang, "I broke the comb". In other words, I used the so-called “neglect method”.3 I started wearing a rolled up balaclava (like the one Khrushchev wore in the famous Karsh photo) even in the worst heat of August. Mom confronted me, "Have you quit combing your ² Oh sure, the Isle of Man TT race (the 2ⁿ� most dangerous sport, after climbing Mt. Everest) is on my bucket list. But I rationalize that bit of brainwashing with the fact that the IOMTT has over 100 years of edifying history to back it up. (That’s my story and I’m sticking to it).
³ This was in the 1980’s, when I was unaware that there were other methods available which didn’t literally take years to accomplish. These other methods typically use waxes and/or rubber bands and/or a potentially dangerous chemical known as glycerol monothioglycolate. They also tend to produce dreadlocks which are thinner and relatively uniform in shape and size…unlike the bulbous mats that sprouted out of my head.
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hair?" And so I gave her the story.
At the time, I was delivering flyers door-to-door – at minus-30 – for a living (probably the worst job this side of a Soviet gulag). But the employers didn't care that I was wearing a lumpy toque. Co-workers didn't seem to mind either.
They might have thought that I was crazy. But I was obviously harmless. One guy said that he just assumed that the big lump in my toque was my
"money bag".
After a while, it outgrew the toque. So Mom
sewed up a kind of bandana out of a bath towel for me.
The hair was starting to get seriously weird. In the mid-1980's, I was probably the only non-Jamaican in Alberta to have matted hair.
Once, I was waiting to use a pay phone at a public park and a couple of cops walked over.
"How come I've never seen you around before?!", one of them barked.
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"Um. I don't know", I replied as innocently as possible. (Of course I knew. On Friday nights, when he was dealing with shit-faced drunks, I was at home, totally absorbed in Washington Week in Review and the McLaughlin Group).
"What are you doing?"
"I'm waiting to use the pay phone"
"Who are you going to call?"
"My sister" (It was the truth...probably for my regular weekly visit to do some laundry, since I was living out of my car at the time.)
"Do you have any drugs on you?"
"No"
"Would you tell me if you did?"
"Of course I would" (I had learned the correct answer since my slip-up on Roger's Pass).
They then asked for my ID, got on the two-way radio and waited for their office cohort to punch some data into the computer.
Nothing. It was five years since my boo-boo, so my record had been wiped clean.
"What do you do for a living?"
I told him about my casual labor gig, and then mentioned that I was also busy upgrading my high school credits so that I could get into university (which was also the truth). By this time, he and his buddy had visible relaxed. We chatted a bit further, but by this time, they realized that I was harmless. They wished me luck at school and one of them even shook my hand.
I loved the matted hair. At the auto parts warehouse, we had to constantly duck down and grab mufflers from beneath enormous metal shelving units. Nowadays, it would call for bump-caps or hard hats. But back then, it was each to his own. However, I had my own 80
hard hat. The jetta strands were incredibly tough, but soft at the same time. And they conformed perfectly to my head. I'd be willing to bet that the larger strands had a tensile strength of half a ton or more.
But women didn’t seem to be quite as enthusiastic about them.
During a date, one asked if I'd ever cut them off. I said no, and I never saw her again. On other dates, the subject seemed to be taboo.
However, one gal, who sat next to me in a university lecture theatre seemed intrigued. "Who does your hair?", she whispered in a conspiratorial voice. I just shrugged and said, "It just does itself."
But, at one point, I did get them cut off. I did it to try and impress a woman. But it soon became apparent that she didn't care one way or the other.
The heft and texture and aesthetics of dreadlocks can be truly extraordinary. It’s not without reason that historically, renunciates never had any monopolies on them. They were also worn by some warrior groups (Wikipedia lists the Maori, Masai, and the early Scottish clans in the latter category). So soldiers obviously knew that there was something imposing about them.
I'd love to grow them back again. However, I suspect my wife might see them as grounds for divorce.
I have a few tattoos. The first (an AUM symbol4 on my left bicep) was done back in 1985, at a time when only bikers, neo-nazis, and Popeye the Sailor had inked body parts. The last (a likeness of Gandhi on my right forearm) was done in 1992. And at some point ⁴ AUM or OM, the primordial sound of the universe, according to Hindus and Buddhists. If you're not familiar with it, just check out any George Harrison album. The symbol is plastered all over his record covers.
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in between, I had the words "Black Flag"5 etched into my right elbow.
There is a another that I'd like to get added to the collection, and amazingly, my wife has agreed to the last request with no mention of any potential divorce proceedings. That would be a likeness of Churchill on my left forearm. Churchill on my left forearm and Gandhi on my right. But Churchill despised Gandhi. Churchill didn't want India to slip from the grasp of the British Empire, whereas Gandhi wanted Indian independence. Churchill was the 20 th century's most famous warrior, whereas Gandhi was its most famous pacifist. They were total opposites, and yet on another level, they were very similar. For example, they both famously despised fascism and communism. So there is unity within opposites (and thus a great set of images for a couple of tattoos).
But I wrote those words a few years ago (during the first few drafts of this book). Fast forward to now, and there is a worthy candidate which may just edge Churchill out of his reserved spot.
I'm referring to George Orwell.
Oh sure, I mentioned Orwell back in chapters i and v. And I'm sure that many of us had read 1984 in high school English class.
And I'm also sure that many of us have heard the word "Orwellian"
being used to describe an out-of-control government bureaucracy bent on destroying the very soul of humanity.
⁵ Referring not specifically to the rock band (since I had never actually listened to any of their music), but to the symbol for anarchism (a black flag). What is anarchism? If you go to the Oxford Thesaurus, it gives the following words as synonyms: agitator, insurgent, insurrectionist, malcontent, mutineer, nihilist, rebel, revolter, revolutionary, terrorist. That doesn't sound terribly appealing.
However, if you go to Wikipedia, it gives a drastically different definition:
"...stateless societies based on non-hierarchical voluntary associations."
That’s very similar to the definition of community, where elements like trust and empathy are paramount – the same elements that are notably absent in the vision statements of both capitalism and socialism. Thus, we need a better balance. I vote for a mix of 60% capitalism, 25% socialism, 10%
anarchism (ie, community), and 5% Monty Python’s “Silly Party” (led by Jethro Q. Walrustitty).
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That's the high school version of George Orwell. That's what I knew about him in the late 1970's. But to really understand the man, you have to read his non-fiction.
I became re-acquainted with him in the early 1990's, when I saw a copy of Down and Out in Paris and London on a friend's bookshelf. So, out of curiosity, I ordered a boxed set of his works of non-fiction, which I devoured in very short order.
Orwell was not only a great writer and a towering intellect; he was also, quite simply, a very decent chap. He (and his 6’ 2” frame) crawled down into the cramped coal mines to see and feel the hardships endured by the stunted, sooty men who formed the basis of the British economy in the 1930’s, and he fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War (and got a bullet in the throat to show for it). We are sometimes asked what historical figure we'd like to have a pint of beer with. Jesus Christ comes to mind. But so does George Orwell.
Was he a right-winger, as anyone who has only read 1984 might immediately assume? Hardly. Here is his description of the idle rich in the 1930's: "They were simply parasites, less useful to society than his fleas are to a dog."6
And this: "...we have got to fight against privilege, against the notion that a half-witted [upper class] boy is better for command than an intelligent mechanic."7
And what type of political system do you suppose he recommended in the year 1947? (when he was just starting to write about the terrifying visions in 1984). "...a Socialist United States of Europe seems to me the only worthwhile political objective today."8
⁶ The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, 1941. Seen in My Country Right or Left and other selected essays and journalism. London: The Folio Society, 1998. P.222.
⁷ ibid. p.241.
⁸ Toward European Unity, 1947. Seen in Funny, But Not Vulgar and other selected essays and journalism. London: The Folio Society, 1998. P.271
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But neither was he blind to the shortcomings of those on the left:
“The immediately striking thing about all these [left-wing] papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power.”9
And not to leave anyone out from his blunt honesty, here is what he wrote about the common Jane and Joe Lunchbox on the street:
"To the British working class, the massacre of their comrades in Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, or whatever it might be, seemed less interesting and less important than yesterday's football match."10 (He was obviously not a paragon of political correctness.) ⁹ The Lion and the Unicorn. P.227 (Hmm. Reminds me of the folks protesting the recent Munk debate between the right-wing extremist, Steve Bannon and the right-wing moderate, David Frum. What were the protesters protesting about? Something about the fact that David Frum isn’t Bernie Sanders. And something about the fact that Steve Bannon still has a right to free speech.) ¹⁰ Looking Back on the Spanish War, 1942. Seen in Funny, But Not Vulgar, p. 14
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Things haven't changed much since Orwell furiously pounded away on his typewriter in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Indeed, Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth was mirrored in many respects by the Donald Trump White House.
Yes, Orwell was a giant of literature. So much so that I got carried away and forgot that I was writing about tattoos.
Tattoos. Yes, well, following are the three pieces of advice I have for anyone contemplating getting one…or a second…or a third…
1. Black ink is better than colour, particularly in that it is more stable. In fact a single bad sunburn can noticeably blur a colour tattoo.11 My first tattoo, on the other hand, is black, and the edges have only just started to blur after a period of over 35
years (though I suppose it may also be due to the exquisite craftsmanship of whoever was working at Smilin’ Buddha in Calgary back then).
2. If you think you'd like to get a particular tattoo, then ponder the choice for at least a year. If, at the end of that year, you still think that you might like to get that particular tattoo, then there is a much smaller probability that you may have made an idiotic decision. (I have made at least one idiotic decision by ignoring that rule).
3. If you walk into a tattoo parlour and it reminds you of a dentist's office (ie, there is a cleanliness that borders on the obsessive, and there is a lot of equipment sitting around that looks like it is new and expensive…like I saw at Smilin’ Buddha), then that's a good sign. But if you walk into a tattoo parlour and the "artist" looks like he belongs to a biker gang and has left his empty beer bottles on the counter, and he wonders out loud why nobody has ever asked him to ink a tattoo of Hitler, then that's a bad sign. (I have made at least one idiotic decision by ignoring that rule).
¹¹ Source: http://poundedink.com/colour-vs-black-and-grey-tattoos/
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My early forays into the realm of mysticism included an introduction to the pseudo-science of pyramidology. I happily lapped it up, and one day, on my parents' dining room table, I assembled a paperboard scale model of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
It was about a foot high and it was held together with Scotch tape. I had read that if you oriented one of the sides to true north (as opposed to magnetic north), and if you suspended a needle from a thread just above the tip of the pyramid, the needle would start to orbit around the tip.
So I tried it. And something seemed to happen. Or did it? I wasn't quite sure, so I moved the pyramid on to the floor, directly under the edge of the table. I placed my hand on the table edge, so that my thumb and fore-finger (holding the thread) were just a tad past the edge (to reduce the chance that I might sub-consciously move the thread). The needle was directly over the point of the pyramid. Nothing. So I gave the needle a slight tap with the other hand. And damned if the thing didn’t start to oscillate! And gradually, the oscillation turned into a small, elliptical orbit. And then a circular orbit – perhaps an inch or two in diameter. I was stunned!
Then, even though it wasn’t mentioned in the book, I wondered what would happen if I placed my other hand over the hand holding the thread. So I did. And the orbit promptly disappeared. Now the needle floated motionless over the tip of the pyramid. Again, I was stunned.1
Later that day, Mom came home, and I showed her. She seemed ¹ To this day, I'm still stunned. I half suspect that if I tried the experiment again, nothing would happen. I've grown more sceptical over the years, since I've had most of a lifetime to hone my bullshit detector. And yet I can't erase my memory of what happened that day. Neither can I erase my memory from a few years later, when in my university dorm room, I put a pear inside another north-aligned paper-board pyramid. After a month or two, I found a tiny, shrivelled pear without a speck of mould on it. I should have put a second pear in a cardboard cube, as a control, but I didn’t think of it at the time.
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impressed. "Why don't you go to university and study this?" (Mom and Dad had been socking away money for years in an RESP for me, so they were getting quite worried that I was turning into a hippie-punk-druggie-slacker, for whom "university" was just a word in the dictionary, right next to “unkempt”.)
She was right, of course. But at the time, I was sceptical of the notion that there could be any program of study in a conventional university that might apply to such a strange phenomenon. I shouldn't have been sceptical. After all, the study of physics would have been a good place to start.
By 1985, I had washed enough dishes, stacked enough mufflers, and delivered enough flyers in sub-zero weather, that I was quite ready for something to challenge my mind, instead of just my body.
And I had heard about an amazing government program which gave out student loans (by this late stage in the game, the RESP was null and void…though my folks at least got their invested capital back).
So I started going to night school to finish off my high school diploma. Chemistry was a breeze for someone who no longer wanted to wash dishes for a living. And in Social Studies, I nabbed an A for an essay on psychedelic drugs.2 For an elective, I chose a course on world religions. It was a correspondence course, so I had to write the final exam (which arrived and departed in a sealed envelope) in a police station, but the cops were cool with the matted hair, and so, soon after that, I was accepted into the University of Calgary.
I arranged to stay in the traditional residences, where I met a few other wise and wonderful weirdos. There was Paul, who helped to organize a speaking engagement at the university for Timothy Leary.3 There was the towering and geeky Chris,4 who went into computer science and who later worked on the team that did the ² It may have helped that for my main reference, I used a thoroughly balanced book on the subject ( Psychedelic Drugs: Psychological, Medical and Social Issues by Brian Wells) which was distributed by a very reputable publisher: Penguin Education.
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special effects for movies such as Moulin Rouge and The Matrix Reloaded. And finally, there was Dave, who combined a conspiratorial chuckle with an ambling, pigeon-toed shuffle, and later wound up consulting for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on the subject of cyber-security.
During my first year, I wasn't sure what I wanted to study. So I took a wide variety of courses: calculus and biology, as well as comparative literature and Tibetan Buddhism. And I found that the old adage was true: a change is as good as a rest. If cell biology was starting to hurt my brain, I'd just switch over to Homer's Odyssey. Or vice versa. In that way, the sciences and the humanities complemented each other perfectly.
I was on Cloud Nine. If cycling back and forth from the frog pond to the candy store was the high point of my childhood, then the first year of university was the high point of my adulthood.
My vocational goals paralleled my zig-zag studying habits. I was torn between the sciences and the humanities. On the one hand, my voracious reading in the areas of eastern religions and mysticism pushed me towards the humanities. But on the other hand, I was also starting to develop an interest in Third World development. That got manifested in an interest in the hard sciences.
³ I remember attending and wanting to walk up to the audience microphone to ask Leary if he thought things might have turned out better if the popularization of the whole acid thing had been better left to the prim and proper Aldous Huxley, instead of himself (the implication being that Leary's somewhat outlandish "turn on, tune in, drop out" was just the sort of message that the establishment wanted to hear in order to justify an over-reaction). But I didn't. I was too nervous about the prospect of even this minor form of public speaking.
⁴ Chris and I got along well enough that we arranged to be room‐mates the following year. And we stayed in touch. A few years after graduation, he asked if I'd be his best man. Unfortunately, the ceremony was 300 km's away and also right in the middle of final exams, so I had to decline. Did I "have" to?
I likely could have arranged to take exams at another time, so I felt bad about it afterwards. But he obviously didn't hold a grudge, since he agreed to be the best man at my wedding about 15 years after that.
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A few years earlier, it also got manifested in the first of many odd ventures, some of which I now look back on and cringe. It was a year or two after Terry Fox's remarkable run for cancer research, and I wondered how I could raise money in a similar manner for a Third World charity. However, unlike Terry Fox, I still had both of my legs. So I had to think of a suitable handicap. I was weightlifting at the time, and since I had fairly good upper body strength, I started walking on my hands. I practiced daily until I could walk about 25
metres at a stretch. I thought that perhaps I could walk the 300
kilometres from Calgary to Edmonton in this way. Even if I was only able to do a kilometre per day, it would at least be a spectacle that could conceivably pull in some money for a deserving Third World charity.
But the one thing I had not considered was that it is very difficult for an introvert to create a spectacle. I drove my car out to the Calgary city limits and steered on to the gentle side-slope of Highway 2. And then I froze. I watched the cars streaming by and I realized that I would look like a complete idiot if I started walking on my hands along the paved shoulder. I had matted hair that looked like Sasquatch penises sprouting out from my head, but I just couldn't force myself to go for that extra bit of weirdness...even if it was for a good cause. So I got back into the car and drove home.
But I digress. My interest in the sciences and Third World development led me to consider either an agriculture degree or a forestry degree (religious studies and the humanities were more interesting, but they had one severe drawback: abysmal job prospects).
Agriculture versus forestry. Hmm. I needed some sage advice. In the botany department, there was a certain Dr. Reid, who taught the introductory biology course in a huge lecture theatre in front of hundreds of students. Whereas most professors would rattle on in a monotone, knowing that the brighter students would somehow grasp what was being said, Reid was expressive; he used humorous anecdotes;5 and he utilized projected transparencies of cell structures ⁵ For example, one of his exam questions asked what one should do if one's cat had a habit of peeing on, and scratching one's cannabis plants. (I think I 89
like an analog IT wizard. His was one of the few classes where even the slackers listened to what was being said.
So I knocked on his door one day and asked what discipline (agriculture or forestry) might be more valued in terms of Third World development. He said forestry, and so that was that. I went into the transfer program which would eventually see me heading north to the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
In retrospect, it was perhaps not the best decision. You see, I soon found out that the forestry class was 90% male, whereas the agriculture class approached a much more even division between the sexes. Heck, I should have gone into nursing! What was I thinking?
But on the other hand, maybe I made the right decision after all (that's a caveat, in case my wife ever reads this).
Around 300 years ago, Alexander Pope wrote An Essay on Criticism. In it, he said "A little learning is a dangerous thing..." It was dangerous for me, in that I would often convince myself that with the completion of a single undergrad course, I’d know everything I’d need in order to go out and change the world.
Economics 101 was particularly dangerous, in that it helped to convince me that what Thoreau said was invariably true: "That government is best which governs least". My dad, the lifelong NDP'er, nearly had an aneurysm when I repeated the quote.
Luckily though, I started taking advanced economics courses that poked holes in my libertarian ideology. One important concept was "marketplace externalities". For example, my car belches out CO2, so Bangladesh and Florida will drown that much sooner. That's a negative externality. For a positive externality, we recently replaced the flammable plastic siding on our house with a fire-proof variety. It not only protects our house, but also creates a fire-break for neighbouring houses. Thus, government incentives (like tax answered something about increased ethylene production and getting more fibrous plants, but it never occurred to me to mention the effect on the soil of the uric acid in the pee).
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credits for fibre-cement siding) and disincentives (such as gasoline taxes) have the power to improve things over and above what the market is able to do.
Another inconvenient principle that libertarians seem unaware of is called "public goods". These are goods or services that are essentially free because it is impossible to stop people from benefiting from them. The text-book example is a lighthouse. It’s impossible to charge individual boat owners who benefit from the signals. So private businesses have no incentive to build lighthouses.
Same goes for health and education. Healthy people tend not to spread as many germs, but they can't very well charge others for the pleasure of not getting sick. And educated people tend not to commit as many crimes, but likewise, they can't get reimbursed from the folks they don't steal from. Therefore, it makes sense for governments to ensure that all citizens are able to access decent health and education services.
And finally, there are "common property resource dilemmas".
How do you divide up a resource like fish in the sea? If I'm a free-rider, I'll catch as many as I can, as fast as I can. And so will everyone else. And before you know it, the fish are all gone (what Garrett Hardin called the "Tragedy of the Commons"). So it makes sense for all concerned to get organized and determine catch limits.
That may take the form of a small cooperative in a coastal fishing village, or, at the other end of the scale, the International Whaling Commission.
Some folks say that it's just not worth it. They figure that governments are inherently inefficient and corrupt, so it's best not to even try. The ironic thing is that these folks probably took advantage of public goods by being born in a public hospital and by being educated in a public school. They may have even taken advantage of a government subsidized university education…though if they did, they obviously never got past Econ 101.
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chapter ix: fighting fires and spotting smokes In my third year of university, I transferred up to Edmonton, where the courses were a bit more challenging…especially Dendrology (the study of trees and shrubs). It gave students the infamous “twig test”, during which we had to look at a series of twigs, and try to decipher which trees or shrubs they came from, as well as give their Latin names. “Dendro” was known as the
“weeder” course, since it weeded out the weaker students. But somehow I managed to get through it.
At the end of the school year, I had four months off (May to August), which also coincided with the peak of the yearly forest fire season. So I was hired by the Alberta Forest Service, and subsequently found myself in the village of Wandering River, half way between Edmonton and the Athabasca Oil/Tar Sands.1
I was placed on an Initial Attack team, consisting of a helicopter pilot and three firefighters, and most days, we sat by a forestry radio, waiting for it to crackle to life and send us to a smoke. In a typical scenario, someone at a remote forest fire lookout tower would see a puff of smoke in the distance. Ideally, someone else at a different tower would then spot the same smoke, and from there, it was just a matter of stretching out two strings on a map: one from the first tower along the precise direction to the smoke, and the other string from the other tower along its direction to the smoke. The strings would then cross at a point where the IA crew – and its equipment2 –
¹ Technically, it’s not tar, but bitumen. And euphemistically, it’s not tar, but oil.
Confused? It was called tar for about a century, but now, if you’re trying to sell the stuff on the world market, “oil” sounds better than either “tar” or
“bitumen”.
² Such as: 1) a chain saw (for cutting down smouldering trees), 2) a pulaski and shovel for dealing with smouldering organic soils, 3) a floating pump and some hose (in case a slough or lake or creek happened to be nearby), 4) some "piss packs" (back-packs capable of being filled with water, and having a hand operated spray nozzle), and 5) a collapsible "bambi-bucket" (with a capacity of 75 gallons or more) that could be slung underneath a helicopter and flown to the nearest water body, where the pilot would descend and dip the self-filling bucket into the water.
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would be scrambled to.
It was an amazing job. Even if there weren't any fires, we would still go up and do a flight path on the hot days.3 These paths would typically take us into the valleys and other areas which were either
"blind" or too distant for the tower people to effectively see into. We kept our eyes peeled for smoke, not only for the potential excitement of dropping down on to a small fire and extinguishing it, but also because the first person to see the smoke would later be informally awarded a case of beer.
Yes, the Wandering River firefighters occasionally drank alcoholic beverages. And I was no exception. However, one morning after a typical celebration (which usually tended to happen after a widespread “precip event”), I had an epiphany. I realized that the
"law of diminishing returns" applied not only to apples and economics,4 but also to alcohol and hangovers. The first and second ³ Lightning strikes would often leave smouldering fires either in the ground or in dead trees. Days or weeks later, when the temperature got high enough, the humidity got low enough, and the wind got strong enough, these embers would then ignite enough fuel to make themselves known in a very spectacular manner.
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beers were effective social lubricants and they tasted great. And if left at that, their contribution to a hangover would have been zero.
However, the third and fourth beers were then added to the equation.
Their additional contribution to the social lubrication was minimal and they only tasted so-so. But more importantly, they now started to make themselves known the following morning. And the fifth and sixth beers only conspired to make the imbalance even worse.
So ever since that particular morning in 1989, I have never felt the urge to get truly shit-faced again. Now, after that first beer, I instead have the urge to boil up a cup of oolong tea (liberally laced with evaporated milk) and then contemplate whether a second beer might even be worth it.
I did that job for two seasons. But then I got restless. There was a woman at one of the towers who was just finishing up her master's degree in history. She spent much of her time at the tower reading…simply reading. Wow! I wanted in!
So, the next summer saw me at a tower. More specifically, I had arrived at Edra Tower (pronounced EED-ra).
It was colloquially known as the Garden of Edra, however there was a bit of sarcasm involved. Edra was about 150 km's north-west of Fort McMurray, right in the middle of the boreal forest. In other words, I was privy to a vast sea of stunted Black Spruce trees, and no shortage of mosquitoes and black flies. However, there was also an airstrip, at the end of which was a rudimentary fire fighter's camp with bunkhouses and a kitchen. So if there was a high fire hazard, my mail drops were somewhat more frequent than the drops at some of the other towers (mail drops for a tower person being roughly equal to Christmas morning for a toddler).
The site consisted of a 100 foot tall tower with a cupola on top, a ⁴ Also known in economic theory as the law of diminishing marginal utility. For example, the first apple tastes great. The second apple tastes OK. The third apple tastes...uh, not OK. The fourth apple is torture.
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generator shed, a massive tank of propane, and a small cabin. The generator shed held a small, single cylinder Onan generator,5 which was scheduled to run three hours per day – it's main task being to charge up the batteries for the
radio transmitter/receiver.
There was a ladder attached
to the tower. And it had hoops
around it, so that if a person
fell, he/she would only fall a
few feet before getting tangled
up. But nonetheless, I had a
healthy fear of heights, and so I
needed to memorize the
location and function of every
last nut and bolt on that tower
before I could lean out of one
of the windows without
experiencing a gut-churning
bout of existential dread.
The cupola was in the shape of an octagon, with a plywood base and fibreglass walls. It was about nine feet from side to side, but right in the middle of the floor was the "firefinder", which was a rugged stand with a big steel protractor perched on top. A rotating ring with a gun scope perched on the protractor, so that when a puff of smoke was lined up in the scope, the precise angle to the fire could be determined.
During my first day on the tower, I calculated the usable walking space to be less than five square meters (about the same as the average bath-room). So at the end of a twelve hour day,6 my legs ⁵ Onan was the fellow in Genesis 38: 8‐10 who committed the sin of premature ejaculation, which led to his dead brother's widow not being able to have children. In subsequent centuries, the term "onanism" became synonymous with masturbation. So why is a generator company called Onan? And why did it later form a union with a diesel company called Cummins? Apparently, some other people were wondering the same thing as I was: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=619603
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would stiffen up to about the same consistency as rotting logs.
But life in the tower could also be idyllic. There was a lush carpet of green as far as the eye could see.7 And advancing across that carpet was the weather: amazing cloud formations, isolated thundershowers slowly gliding across the landscape, weird lightning bolts that seemed to defy physics, and "undercast" conditions in the mornings that made it look like I was floating on a sea of cotton candy.
At other times, it could be scary. Lightning storms were especially unnerving, since there was a lightning rod on top of the tower and the tower was usually the tallest structure for many miles around. I learned to keep a supply of earplugs on hand, and I also learned to keep perched on the wooden chair instead of leaning up against the metal fire-finder.
⁶ The hours required up in the tower varied with the fire hazard. On days with widespread rain, I would be down in the cabin most of the time. However, with dry fuel and hot temperatures, the opposite would be the case.
⁷ In later years, on a tower west of Swan Hills, I could literally look over one shoulder and see the Rocky Mountains, and then look over the other shoulder and see Lesser Slave Lake. That's a total distance of over 300 kilometres.
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And then there were the
animals: swallows (expert dive-
bombers whose main target was
my unprotected head),
chipmunks (expert acrobats, who
took bribes smothered in peanut
butter), and bears…lots of bears.
I became used to them after a
while. And I had little to fear,
since I was mainly a vegetarian. The only interesting aroma that ever came wafting out of the cabin would have been that associated with the occasional tin of kippered herring – and that was soon eliminated with a bit of soapy water in the kitchen sink.
They were generally Black Bears (even the gal in the photo above, being a cinnamon coloured Black). Grizzlies were a rarity. In fact, during my eleven summers at various Towers, I only once had a visit from the hump-backed cousins.
It was early evening, and I saw a bunch of bears down at the far end of the lawn.8 This was a rarity; up until now, all of the bears that ⁸ Actually, the "lawns" at most towers were more like fields. At Tony Tower, I calculated that in order to cut the lawn once, I had to push the mower about ten kilometres.
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came to visit had been solitary. But here were four of them. So I quickly grabbed my 110 instamatic,9 opened the main door and snapped a shot through the screen door. They still hadn't seen me, and one of
them came
over to
chew on
the rain
gauge, as
the other
three
ambled
over to
investigate
the
Stevenson
Screen.10
Finally, I opened the door. Now they saw me, and one of them stood up on its hind legs to get a
better look. I took another shot,
but it was shaky, since I had
never seen a crew like this
before.11 And when I got back in
the house and peered out the
window, I noticed the tell-tale
humps of ursus horribilis.
However, they left quietly, the
⁹ If a medium format camera with a
digital back can be compared to a Ferrari, and if a DSLR can be compared to a Audi, and if the typical point-and-shoot camera can be compared to the cheapest currently available Chevy, then a 110 instamatic would likely be a Soviet-era Lada.
¹⁰ A louvered white box containing instruments for measuring max/min temperatures and humidities.
¹¹ Most likely a mating pair with two two-year-olds, according to naturalist Ben Gadd (personal communication).
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rain gauge survived intact, and after a few minutes, my heart rate settled down.
One evening, I was out in the shed, checking the oil level in the generator, and a call came over the radio. I rushed back into the cabin and grabbed the mike. I don't remember if the caller was from another tower or from the ranger station. I don’t remember what the conversation was about. And neither did I remember that I had been checking the oil level.
Anyway, after the conversation, I made supper, washed up the herring tin, and settled down to read a chapter or two of Don Quixote – by the light of a bulb whose current came from the generator that I remotely kicked into life.
That's when the cabin suddenly went dark. And that's when I remembered that I had been checking the oil level in the generator.
I sprinted out to the shed. Oil was everywhere...except in the generator. The piston had seized and now I had the embarrassing task of calling in the next morning to let the whole world know what an idiot I was.
A helicopter was hurriedly scheduled to bring in a replacement unit, and there was some friendly ribbing from the guys who lugged the heavy conglomeration of steel into the shed. But that turned to cursing when one of them slipped on a bit of oil that I had missed during the clean up. No broken bones, though.
A few weeks later, the fire hazard started to climb into the red, and I was spending more and more time up top. To fend off the boredom, I had a short-wave radio tuned to the “beeb” (or the BBC, as some prefer to call it), and lots of books. I would read a page, then scan the horizon for a wisp of smoke. Read a page, then scan. Read.
Scan. Repeat. Except this time, I didn't look around fast enough.
Dunston, my neighbour, spotted a smoke right under my nose. (OK, so it was 20 kilometres away. But it was on my side of the ridge).
Embarrassing. The only saving grace was that there was no wind.
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And no wind meant no conflagration and no million dollar campaign fire. Just two or three hours of helicopter time and a bit of practice for the firefighters.
A missed smoke is one thing. A seized piston is another. But disregarding the chain of command is quite another still. It goes back to the Alexander Pope quote: “A little learning is a dangerous thing...” I had just finished a degree in forestry. So I was smart.
Really smart. But not smart enough to know what an idiot I was. I don't even remember what the issue was about. Something trivial.
Something having to do with fire suppression that I thought could have been improved upon. In any case, I wrote a letter of complaint to the forest superintendent, instead of my immediate supervisor – a difference of several levels in the chain of command. So, the next thing I knew, there was a chopper on my doorstep. Seems that some of the folks back at the office just wanted to know if my head was screwed on correctly.
They were correct to have their suspicions. For some reason, the towers tend to attract, um...people who are different. For instance, there was the fellow who walked around with a tin foil cap on, hoping to attract UFO's. There was the gal who was anorexic and thought that the tower would be an ideal place to lose a few more pounds...until her knees gave out on her, and she couldn't climb the tower any more. And there was the guy who had a disturbing fetish for bear hides...as well as the requisite greasy frying pan and a rifle.
There were also some misplaced extroverts. They loved the idea of communing with nature, but they had never spent any extended periods alone. One of them, after less than a week, got on the radio to say “uh, sorry, but you've really, REALLY got to come and get me out of here...like yesterday!”.
And finally, there was the out-of-work truck driver with the impaired charge, who tried to order ten cases of beer along with his groceries. The ranger acquiesced with one or two cases, but the sot still wound up effectively AWOL for a day or two.
So, I was hospitable to the visitors who stepped out of the chopper for a quick cup of coffee, and they seemed to accept my 100
(truthful) explanation that I was just too dumb to realize what
“superintendent” meant.
A week or two after that, I had my first “fire flap”. Even before breakfast, the whole district could see the early warnings associated with altocumulus castellanus12 clouds. These soon burned off in the heat, but by late morning, cumulus clouds started forming out of nowhere. And by early afternoon, they had grown to become the towering, anvil-like cumulonimbi. Lightning started to flash, and it quickly found the dry, spongy muskeg. By the time the thunder reached my ears, a small wisp of smoke caught my eyes. I quickly rotated the spotting scope to get a bearing, and made a rough estimate of the distance. Seconds later, I was on the radio to the ranger station.
A couple of helicopters with their Initial Attack teams had been dispatched earlier to the general area. They knew what to expect.
About half a dozen smokes were now visible in my area, and my adrenaline was pumping overtime. I could see that one of the helicopters was headed to the fire that I had first called in. But as the isolated storm cell advanced, sheets of rain smothered the fire that it had produced only ten minutes earlier. However, other smokes from other cells were still active, and I updated the pilot (and the ranger station), so that he could change course. This series of updates went on for most of the afternoon, and since I had the best view of the area, I felt a bit like an air traffic controller.13
The few Initial Attack crews that were available got put down at whatever fires were still burning. But as they were no longer up in ¹² …looking just like the crenellated row of notches along the top of a castle wall.
¹³ In fact, a friend from another tower had been an air traffic controller. He found it ironic that he had quit his former job, thinking that he would leave all of the stress behind. Little did he count on the stress of dealing with a fire flap. Neither did he count on the constant stress of a 12 hour day up in the tower during high hazard, knowing that there was a decent likelihood that the lightning which had passed through a week or two ago, might have left a few smouldering embers in the fibrous ground.
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the air, their radio signals couldn't reach the ranger station, and I had to relay accurate messages about fire behaviour, equipment needs, and estimated times for extinguishment. With all of the activity on the ground, in the air, and back at the office, there would often be traffic jams on the various radio frequencies. It was a delicate balance, knowing when – and when not to – step on other ongoing transmissions, and sometimes the poor guys out on the fire must have thought that I was ignoring them.
At the end of the day, however, all of the fires had been extinguished. I suppose I must have done OK, since a month or two later, my boss asked me if I'd be interested in coming back for the next season. The burned out generator, Dunstan's smoke, and the letter to the superintendent weren't mentioned. And by the next summer, I was one year older and slightly less stupid.
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A typical wild weekend in the 1980's: 1) Friday evening with the channel selector turned to PBS, where Washington Week in Review and The McLaughlin Group 1 were the hit shows, and 2) Saturday evening, a blur of lost time spent waiting for Saturday Night Live to come on around midnight.
I rarely went out to bars or nightclubs. The drinks were too expensive, and I was far too shy and weird looking to strike up conversations with women. However, if the music was good, and if the atmosphere was sufficiently bohemian…
I liked the earthy vibes that permeated places like the old National Hotel in Calgary. It would cater to garage bands and punk bands, and it wasn't unheard of for the grizzled old bouncer/bartender to shuffle up to the stage, single out one of the scruffy kids twanging away on the guitar, and haul him outside for being under the legal age.
Typically, if it was summer, I lived in my car (an ancient Subaru Leone, about the size of a kitchen table). I'd drive to one of the residential streets near the “Nash”, park it, and if I had a bit available, I'd sneak a toke or two of pot. Then, I'd walk over to the bar, grab a choice table and order a beer. I also had reading material with me. If it was pre-1985, it might have been Thoreau or Huxley.
If it was post-1985 (ie, university), it might have been calculus or Homer.
After a while, the band would start up. Sometimes, the music was terrible (but still better than the soulless techno-beat in the nightclubs). However, mostly it was at least interesting enough to tap my toes to. And sometimes, it was nothing less than stellar (I still haven't heard a version of Fever that comes anywhere close to matching the one I heard at the Nash so many years ago).
¹ I guess I wasn’t the only person under 30 watching, since Saturday Night Live spoofed The McLaughlin Group more than once. In fact, Dana Carvey did such an eerily realistic John McLaughlin, that the real McLaughlin had to come on to the show and dispose of Carvey for a Halloween episode.
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When the music was good, I’d put a little wad of toilet paper in each ear, and then get real friendly with the pounding speakers up near the stage. Not really dancing. More like a frenetic jig. So frenetic that I had to keep my eyes closed, since a flying dreadlock always threatened to take one of them out.
After my work-out, I'd slowly finish my beer and then head back to the car, where I’d flip the passenger seat back and struggle into my sleeping bag. In the morning, I'd wake up to the warmth of an already risen sun, and since there was no hangover to deal with, life was pretty good…though somewhat lonely.
I kept my hopes up with the personal ads in the newspaper.
However, in the interest of transparency, I would always post ads which implied that I had very little interest in such proletarian pursuits as watching professional sports and "partying". Of course, that severely limited the field, so generally only one or two women would bother to answer.
A date for a coffee might follow. If I was lucky, there was some mutual chemistry. If I was unlucky, there was mutual chemistry accompanied by an ideological divide. For example, there was Amanda. She was a young school teacher who was short, cute, brunette, and somewhat embarrassed to admit that she was unable to explain to a child how a ship made of steel could float. But I was hooked on her, and she also seemed quite happy to meet up for a few more dates.
Once, we went out to Banff for the day, and so we had a good chance to chat in the car. However, on the dash, I had affixed a 104
small, ceramic Buddha, which I had made when I was about ten years old. It was the type that was mass produced, just waiting for some kid to paint it, so that it could be glazed and popped in an oven. But in my case, the irony was that we painted those Buddhas in Sunday School.2
Amanda wasn't impressed. "That Sunday School teacher should have been fired!"
And it went downhill from there. That evening, we went to my sister's place for supper, and though Kathy was still very involved in the church we both grew up in, saying grace at the table was considered a bit of an anachronism. Not for Amanda, though, since she later told me that this serious omission was the final nail in the coffin.
Ideological differences were usually not an issue, though. More often, it was a simple case of stupidity…my stupidity.
I met Betsy via another personal ad, and the first date went well.
For a second date, we went to a wine and cheese event put on by the university’s religious studies club that I belonged to. She was fine with that.
But she had a tendency to wear brightly coloured polka-dotted clothing (I always wore muted earth tones). And she had bleached hair (too trendy). I should have given her a Nobel Prize for putting up with someone who had gigantic dreadlocks and an affinity for tattered lumberjack jackets.3 But instead, I ditched her.
² Or maybe it wasn't so ironic, given the ecumenical outlook of the United Church of Canada. For example, the church I attended a few years ago didn't shy away from inviting a native elder in, so that the congregation could learn a bit about the aboriginal faith.
³ At one point, I had the habit of wearing the jackets literally to shreds. If it developed holes, I would buy a new one and then wear the old crumbling one over top of the new one...until it fell off. Utilitarian, but not very stylish.
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After the newspaper ads, came the matchmaking services. Once or twice a month, I found myself in a little room with a television hooked up to a VCR. Carmen was the manager of one of these companies. She would give me three or four tapes to view, and on each tape, a young woman could be seen telling the camera about herself...just as I had previously told the camera about myself. If I happened to like any particular woman on any particular tape, I would let Carmen know, and she would show the woman my tape. If the response was similar, phone numbers would get exchanged.
I didn't get a lot of responses. Even though I had, by this time, shorn my dreadlocks, I was still a tad unconventional. I suspect I had mentioned my interest in religious studies and mysticism, but possibly the real deal breaker was my interest in Third World development.4
Carmen was a few years older than me, but she was also quite attractive. And a flashy dresser. One day, I was alone with her in her office, and she complained about how hot it was. Then she kicked off her shoes and swung a couple of shapely legs up on to her desk.
I thought to myself , "Hmm. That doesn’t seem quite normal." At the time, I thought it was either a seduction or some sort of test. But in any event, my timidity forced me to play stupid, and after a few minutes, she put her feet back down on the floor.
On one of the visits, she introduced me to a female client, who was just leaving. This struck me as rather odd, since Carmen was usually fairly careful to segregate the visits. The young woman was quite attractive, and was accompanied by a child. She asked me about my university studies, and when I mentioned Third World development, she asked if I'd be spending a lot of time overseas.
Though not really knowing one way or the other, I replied that I probably would be.
⁴ I think I also must’ve given off a particular pheromone which women could easily detect, and were repelled by. Of course I’m referring to that molecular arrangement commonly known as “desperation”.
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Whoops! Wrong answer! I never saw her again, and Carmen never showed me her tape. And as I look back, I don’t recall getting a single date out of that service.
In keeping with the alphabetic theme, there was Debbie, an attractive bohemian intellectual who I had met at the U. of A…and for whom I had the hots for. So, after a summer on one of the towers, I called her up and we decided to go and check out Old Strathcona.
She wasn't quite ready when I arrived at her place. She said she had to shave her legs. Hmm. That’s interesting. Very interesting.
And as she did her business – with the bathroom door ajar – my hormones raced.
As we walked down towards 82nd Ave. on that warm September day, I noticed that she had done a fairly good job on her legs. And I also noticed that she was fumbling around in her pocket.
"Damn! How did I
wind up with these in
here?"
She pulled out a pair
of panties, and I tried not
to stare. I should have
slobbered over them like
a rabid dog, but instead, I
commiserated with her on
her silly mistake. I should
have offered her a million
dollars for them – or
simply grabbed them and
ran – but I just mumbled
something, and we kept
walking.
Charlie Brown, when
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talking about the "little red-haired girl" famously said "...pretty faces make me nervous". But in those days, it was a quote from William Blake that haunted my thoughts:
“Better murder an infant in its cradle than nurse an unacted desire."
However, neither a clever quote by a 19th century poet, nor a heart wrenching admission from a balloon-headed comic book character came close to solving my problem.
So why were Chuck and I so petrified of pretty faces? I can’t speak for him, but I know that in my case, it had a lot to do with being short, as well as the acne eruption that demolished my adolescent ego. Do you recall Timothy Leary’s Eight Circuit Model of Consciousness? I have no doubt that my anxieties metastasized during the “imprinting” process associated with the “domestic and socio-sexual” circuit. In other words, even though I was shy around girls as a kid,5 my teen years were the time when the crippling fear near a pretty face got thoroughly baked into my neurons. I just hope that if Charlie Brown ever becomes a teenager, he won’t have to deal with that curse called acne.
Pornographic magazines took some of the sting out of the loneliness, however I'm not sure whether they were a positive or negative force in my life. A crutch can be used to help a lame person walk, but a crutch can also be used to delay the inevitable transition to when it can be thrown away. And was hard to tell the overall effect, since there wasn’t any control group to compare to. There was no parallel universe in which I didn't have access to the ⁵ During the summer holidays, as we sat together on a transit bus headed to the mall, she whispered “You remind me of Spock”. But I pretended not to know what she was talking about. We were both thirteen years old, but she had obviously hit puberty before I had . She was totally entrancing, with a dark blue halter-top, hair just like Marsha Brady, and a face to match. I had her all to myself, but I was scared shitless and still bereft of the hormones which would, in just a few months, make my face a mess.
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magazines. In fact, with regard to pornography and the lack of control groups, a recent study in Montreal ran into problems because the researchers were unable to find any men in their 20's who did not either flip through the pages or pop in the DVD's on a regular basis.6
One day, I was asked about it by Ivan, who was a Chilean student working on a Phd in the humanities (I'm not surprised that it took a foreign student to ask such a delicate question; the average Canadian guy would prefer to talk about hockey stats). He simply asked what I thought about pornography. He perhaps wondered how I survived without women, when he, on the other hand, was so successful in that area. So successful, in fact, that our landlord had started to frown on the numerous visits to his room by his numerous female friends (well, maybe there were just two or three of them, but that was far more than either myself or the landlord could hope to attract). I told Ivan that I didn't have a problem with porn, except when my obsession with the glossy images threatened to take time away from other pursuits...like homework. He agreed, being very well acquainted with the latter.
The only time that it threatened to become an obsessive pastime was years later, when the internet suddenly appeared. Internet porn was free (much of it, anyway), and it was extremely abundant. And it was more fun than a barrel of monkeys. But it led to a computer having to be trashed, due to viruses.
It was addictive, and after about a month or so, I felt like the proverbial lab rat, that had two levers to pull. One lever gave food pellets, and the other lever gave cocaine. After a while, the rat would be found on the floor of the cage, dead as a doornail. White powder was everywhere, but the food lever had never been pulled. And internet porn was my cocaine.
Does pornography denigrate women? Does it cause us guys to devalue the average woman, in favour of the beauty contest winners? Perhaps. But I suspect that a million years of evolution, and the onset of hormones at puberty, has already had a bigger say in ⁶ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/relationships/6709646/All‐men‐watch‐porn-scientists-find.html
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the matter.
And then there is the so-called oldest profession. Even though, by this time, I was nearing the half-way point of my allotted three score and ten years without having known the joy of sex, I had never really seriously considered the prospect of going to see a prostitute.
For one thing, I was shy. If it was impossible to start a conversation with a woman in a bar, then (as John McLaughlin would say) it was a “metaphysical certitude” that I would be unable to pick up the phone and dial one of the numbers listed beside a luscious face in the yellow pages.
On top of that, I always had the impression that sex with a prostitute would be an emotionally empty experience (certainly for her, and likely for me). I had even heard of Nevada brothels, where the rules stipulated that there was to be no kissing.
And finally, I was a student. I didn't have bundles of cash to throw around. The occasional Penthouse magazine was a lot cheaper and a lot quicker.
And finally, there was Emma. She answered a personal ad that I had posted in the Globe and Mail, and although she lived about a thousand kilometres away, she was gorgeous (we had exchanged photos by mail), she read Harper's, and my parents also happened to live at the end of that thousand kilometres. So, at the close of one of the fire seasons, I loaded up my rust-bucket and headed west.
The first date seemed to go well. We were both intellectually inclined, and we explored everything from the merits of populism7
to the merits of Monty Python. And as I found out later, a fairly impressive bookshelf adorned one wall of her apartment.
⁷ She despised populism (for good reason, since it is generally associated with demagogues like Trump and murderers like Duterte). But she also – like many of the elites in our society – seemed unwilling to separate out populism from the more positive forms of working class participation, such as Deliberative Democracy.
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I noticed some small laceration scars on her forearm that she admitted causing herself. She didn't try to hide them. But neither did she go into any detail about why she might have put them there. And I was too shy to pry.
One day, we went for a walk in a local park. And as we strolled along, I summoned up all of my courage, and asked if I could hold her hand. I was a bit stunned when she said "no", and my fragile ego didn't have the strength to ask why not.
A week or two after that, she invited me over to her place for a home-cooked meal...and she hinted that I might be able to explore some of that exquisite territory that I had been dreaming about for the past few weeks.
After the meal, we relaxed on the couch. Or rather, we parked ourselves on the couch, since she had on a short skirt, and my hormones were in a mad rush to get something done. I put my hand on her knee and she didn't brush it away. My hand strayed somewhat further. Still no objections. I found myself blurting out the somewhat preposterous suggestion that we might be more comfortable down on the carpet...and she agreed. Then, another preposterous suggestion. And another…until I lost my virginity. It was a couple of decades too late, but I didn’t complain.
A few weeks after that, she told me over the phone that it was over, and that the only reason she let me in was because she felt sorry for me. That was Christmas Day. Certainly not the kind of gift I was hoping for.
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