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I'm also an artist and my cities contain steel erections and my highs are invisible.
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This is an attempt at portraying reality, albeit a unique perspective on reality, to communicate the experience of hallucinations and delusions; the wonder and terror of insanity. My diagnosis is schizoaffective," defined as simultaneous schizophrenia and an affective disorder like clinical depression or manic-depression. The schizophrenia drives my words into gale-force frenzies of bizarre punctuation; lots of semi-colons--dashes (like this one), parenthetical statements: like the last one... and ellipses. Suicidal depression results in short and choppy sentences, mania bizarre porn. My illness can seriously disrupt speech-circuits in the brain, sometimes making of my black humor near incomprehensible word-salad. Timothy Leary always liked my letters and put excerpts into Surfing the Conscious-Nets where he credits me with "good attitudes".
For years I was hospitalized repeatedly. Since beginning Clozaril, though, my recovery was miraculous. This med is the first of a new arsenal against the destroyer of dreams, mental illness. This "Wonder Drug" has also spawned Zyprexa and Resperdal not to mention Seroquel which is what I am taking now. At the same time research into anticonvulsants has produced more anti-manic drugs. Unfortunately, my old doctor from Electric City back when the Perky Pam Layout was going there for med checks refused to put me on Clozarel. It had to wait for someone competent to try it on me. All he ever tried to do was enroll me in Narcoholics Numinous, the dread Scooby Club. They, in turn, told me I had to go off all my meds, so I quit goin' to meetin's and reading the Blue Book. I am doing fine without them.
Bill Veeder, first Guggenheim Fellow to a Soviet Nation compared some of my early writing to Shakespeare, which drove the Invisible Hog into paroxysms of fury. This is because the Hog wants to hog that glory for himself. (The Invisible Hog is the world's most advanced attack motorcycle with enough armament to sink a battleship, a cloaking device and the brains of the great science fiction author, Harley Davison, on a microchip. Sometimes I wonder if the Hog has any brains, no matter how many Hog-o and Nebulous Awards he's won.)
If I would never have had my breakdown I might have gained that kind of stature. However, after that my writing was a mixture of genius and garbage. Veeder even had to tell me the next fall that I'd lost it. I suspected the problem might be not-smoking dope, so with a great deal of trepidation, I smoked a couple submarines and went uptown to view the Dali in the Art Institute, and started over. This time, he said, I don't know what you're doing now, but you're definitely back on the right track. And all you sweet girls with all your sweet talk you can all go take a fucking walk and I guess that I just don't know. Although my initial use of U-boat cured the mild depression I'd been in for the last couple years, I continued smoking Rasta cigars until I was thrown into the Hotel Gonzo. Marijuana was my form of self-medication and it worked. For awhile. Until it made me paranoid. Yet even in paranoia, Reality was on my side. The one person who loved it all, who reveled at my hurricanes of hallucination, my Mindstorms, was Timothy Leary. He did me the favor of putting some of my letters into Surfing the Conscious Nets, a graphic novel with computer art by Howard Hallis..
My girlfriend is creating a parallel document to this one, the deluxe and delightful Trish the Dish,, who has finally terminated my chronic obsession with VADIS, broadcast daily on Radio Free Absemir. The station from the star Regulus where the Green Lion dwells and snake-people vie with bat-men in the forests of eternal dawn; paranoid comic book lawyers scream for more at the Batmobile's poison door.
If you feel like surfing around quite a bit in pop art, try Trish's trippy pages on Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. Every Tuesday night we watch Buffy, in her very Skiffy Scooby Gang. Like so many of the Buffster's fans, we think Willow is so totally provocative; gay lady lay across my big brass bed.
While you're at it, visit the Wako Kid's Rory Gallagher page. The guy's a big fan of this blues rock musician, Rory Gallagher, and has developed an elaborate page on him. I first met Wako at Ricky's Rekerds before it moved to the Invisible Holiday Village. Wako is a collector and has a thousand LPs and CDs. A monster stereo with several hundred disc CD changers and now a recordable one. A batmobile, vintage used Mustang. Every Saturday, we have this ritual, going out to McRonald's for McSoda McPop and sometimes a Bozo Burger. Made from 90% soybeans..
Trish, like myself, like all my mentally ill friends and some of my mentally ill enemies, suffers from stigma. As an insane science fiction author, stigma has been a major problem for me; everyone in Invisible City knows the great darkness produced in my life by shame and dread such as the media portrayal of the mentally ill as violent, though there are always exceptions. As a matter of fact, most of the mentally ill are of more danger to themselves than to others.
Invisible City, North Dakota, is where I live in my fiction, a bizarre parallel universe created for Timothy Leary, who in turn created Huck Getty Mellon von Schlebrugge out of my interminable letters. Huck is the hero of Surfing the Conscious Nets; a graphic novel. Tim wrote several sequels, but after he died the publisher cancelled the series. Unfortunately, I was to be editor-in-chief of a later edition, now I must face the comix industry with my Rootboy alone, the lurker in sewers and creationist newsgroups--I love to see creation clowns make fools out of themselves.
Invisible City is a realm of shadow and phantom essence, just north of the Cat's Foot Hills and the Iron Claw Mountains, the Interzone of the real Montana, a strange and alien place. Life is more exciting in Montana, and we all knew that before there were stupid car commercials telling us so. These commercials contain pictures of cowboys which miss the Native population and the kids cruising playing rap at high volumes with the huge sub-woofers in the trunk.
The name "Invisible City" comes from Timothy Leary, the President of my Fan Club, the Great Gray Wizard; the fugitive acid casualty who finally took refuge in cyberspace. Nicotine Tim was a man of many paradoxes: once, he sent me a letter saying, "Don't you realize High Times is totally opposed to everything we dream of?" Later, he wrote a letter encouraging me to join Narcoholics Numinous, Years later, he called, saying, "We all know illegal drugs are better for you than legal ones." In spite of Tim, I eventually kicked drugz on my own. In fact I walked out of one Treatment Centersone as being a former philosophy major I found their mysticism unpalatable. Though personally, the hardest drug I ever had to quit was nicotine.
The Perky Pam Layout and VADIS, not to mention Whore-lover Fat and Perky Pam herself, are all allusions to Philip K. Dick, the world's greatest dead science fiction author and better than the living ones (except maybe William Gibson). Like Dick, I went BEYOND GOD & SISYPHUS; and the only thing beyond God is Sisyphus. God on his little unicycle, every evening riding the tightwire for Love and Death, for Mind and Body, for all the dualities which exist in the Cosmic Circus where the world is Sophie's abortion. A place to find eldritch things in the twilight.
VALIS is one of Philip K. Dick's best creations. The Vast Active Living Intelligent Systems are a number of alien satellites from the planet Lucifer. The machine is actually God. Lucifer orbits the star Regulus, a planet of sphinxes from which the Green Lion also comes. And VADIS, in all the psionic satellite's surreal destructive nature, led to the creation of Philip K. Dick is Dead. A flawed fantasy whose best feature is an eldritch vision.
The Vast Active Destructive Intelligent System, being a Drugster Truckdrivin' Woman and a head of the Ku Klux Klan, hated Jocelynn, my first girlfriend; deep-black so beautiful; thighs the color of midnight, successful hills, sailing submarines all night long. And hey. this "how to get girls thru hypnotism" stuff really works. She came into the dorm, Snitchcock-Hell, playing trance-forming mind-games; I took her in, I drove it deep, a mainline of inter-racial love. This is how it should have been as my best friend from the Invisible High had been a Black Panther. So out of place in the sunset west he was eternally grateful for me helping him on his homework and obtaining straight A's for him.
And she shivered me timbers and blew me woody.
My psychosis first appeared in First and Second Grade, where I was fed Dog-Yummies by Sister Mary Demon for having a childhood schizophrenia, forced to sit in the garbage can for no reason other than being different. The nuns were always punishing me but I never knew for what. Part of the problem was that I had a sixth-grade reading level in first-grade; run, Dick, run simply bored me. The world became evil, became an eater of corpses; myself, the corpse. The incipient illness disappeared when I left parochial school, only to later reemerge in High School when I wrote a novel for the Actual Schmaing's English class. I turned into my typewriter and had a Gnostic religious experience, an eldritch, mystical vision. which united evolution with religion. Creation is ongoing and continuous and evolution is the Thought of God.
Schizophrenia has justly been called the "destroyer of dreams." My illness caused my mind to shatter into vast evolving idea complexes; schizoid, manic, depressed states, an insidious acid, a bitter herb. Until I discovered the God-made herb for the healing of the nation. For years the Gnostic religion revealed to me by the Alien God ate away slowly at my Catholic roots; God was dead, I AM THAT I AM from out of nowhere dying. I descended deeper than the day could ever know into the abyss, the reality of Scripture forsaken. As a teenager I'd been saved at a revival meeting, started reading the Bible every day and speaking in tongues. Then when insanity hit I took on the three stigmata of alienation, blurred reality, and despair. I saw God die! Yet nonetheless I went out to the local Catholic church, a belief system which I never abandoned until home on summer break. My mother took myself and all my brothers to confession while I was stoned. The priest kicked me out for citing Nietzsche as my favorite philosopher.
Ultimately, I wrote this chick in the dorm a suicide note, and started going to Student Mental Health on her suggestion. They finally placed me into Group Therapy, which pretty much cured me after I started smoking dope. It's the best antidepressant available. I'd initially begun smoking after being diagnosed with a severe case of the dread mutant killer glaucoma, so-called because my great-grandfather's eyes hemorrhaged and he bled to death. Glaucoma being the disease for which doctors recommend marijuana most, I bought a baggie and an atomic bong and started getting high every day with Bill Gorilla, Tim C. Ugly and My Sharonna, not to mention Andy Roach and Joe Clip.
You know you're really in Cartoon-land when Joe Clip money starts to replace your crisp Friendlies. Which reminds me, the last time I was on acid (and a drug-salad of crystal meth, coke, a Bud tallboy, an artane and a joint) I wrote the beginning of my next novel, Fear and Loathing in Los Angeles, about Andy Roach and Joe Clip's road trip to LA to see Timothy Leary. Unfortunately, like "Kubla Kahn," I may lack the inspiration to finish it. Unless maybe I go on a nutmeg binge.
How did all the marijuana effect nt grades, you may ask? If you're a teenage high school DARE brat and believe all the government propaganda, you'd expect me to have flunked out. When I abandoned Hunter S, Thompson House for the land of the Horlots Bigdom Jacques confronted me with the issue of my nightly submarine trips. When I told him U-boat made me creative, he ejaculated, "It makes you think you're being creative," over and over.
--Then why did Veeder give me an A for it?
--Show us your grades!
I fetched my report card. Three A's and a B in a graduate class. He dropped the thing in abject terror. I've never known anyone to look more shocked. He looked like he knew savage dread the way I was later to know fear and loathing.
Unfortunately for the Partnership for a Drug-free America, I finished all of my BA Thesis, A New Chemical Philosophy on marijuana, and graduated with Special Honors for it. Or, as Timothy Leary put it, "What we don't need now is more new chemicals; what we do need is a new chemical philosophy for the space age." Another of Nicotine Tim's quotes is, "You are already one of the great authors of the 21st Century." Which is why I'm changing the title of Mindstorm to 21st Century Schizoid Man. Insane Marvelous Comix lawyers aside. A New Chemical Philosophy is now The Celebration of the Lizard. Or, as Bill Veeder used to say, I know a phallic symbol when I see one! .
The plot of A New Chemical Philosophy is secondary to the symbolism, or rather, is generated by it. What's here is a sequence of surreal images arranged in an order determined by a confluence between Jung's Psychology and Alchemy and Stanislav Grof's LSD psychology. Grof was the director of the Spring Grove Clinic, the last remaining LSD clinic in the world, until he published and the powers that be decided he sounded a little too much like my good buddy Nicotine Tim. So they pulled the plug on his experiments.
It was a winter day and I was in the Thompson House lounge, contemplating a paper due for Bob Richards' class, in Historiography of Science.
Just then Eric Sandoz entered the lounge, and offered me a hit of speed to catalyze the emergence of my creativity. Something it's never really done as well as U-boat. I immediately was thrown off-track and started writing about Grof. When I went into the hall for a drink of water, I saw a huge rainbow around the hall lights--a glaucoma symptom--and thus promptly smoked a little weed in my homemade water-pipe. I then proceeded to photocopy some of the alchemical wood-block prints in Jung's book and pasted them together into a series of collages.
Grof's theory is that there are four "Basic Perinatal Matrices," which are memories and symbols drawn from the "return to the womb" and the whole "death/rebirth" phenomenon which affects us in dying. I initially bought into this philosophy as it portrayed in a vivid manner the manic- depressive cycle which hadn't been diagnosed properly for years, so I wasn't put on lithium, which could have changed my whole life beneficially. Yet although I believe he's created a true reflection of my psychotic states, I believe something which perturbs mental systems so powerfully cannot be an "amplifier" of unconscious states, as he maintains.
Bob
Richards gave me a B for it, saying "I loved it so much I even read stuff
aloud to my wife, but it had nothing to do with the course."
Later, I turned it into an MA Thesis following an LSD trip I'd taken. It was sabotaged by a clown with a bottle of booze, the treachery of the Bozo King and his cohorts in Alfalfa High, the Drug Fraternity was an attempt to punish me for writing psychotic letters to a Vadisystem who lived there, a boy-chick whom I could not convince needed my Dick, not to mention my Zelazny or Farmer. After Bozo made sure I was plenty doped up on acid and vodka he abandoned me to roam the Nite City streets.
There was cold night-sin, the thrill of it all with Roxy sirens as I stumbled around amidst the infinite trajectories of headlights. The joy of oral sex on the streets that autumn night, a hooker in psychedelic furs in the early mourning man-madonna of Genesis. The music inspired me, the brave Imperial aerosol king with his spray-gun of UBIK--the Lamb lay down on Broadway, churchgoers replacing the whores who faded away. Like the corpse- eating world; whatever it eats, it hates.
It was the most wonderful and most terrible thing that ever happened to me.
My desire to become the world's greatest living science fiction author and better than the dead ones started back in the Invisible High when I got an A+ on an English paper, an intellectual feat only equalled years later for a paper for Bill Wimsatt on signal-processor metaphors as a means of understanding both all non-biological evolutionary systems like esthetics and religion along with their biological counterparts. Unfortunately, I lost the original paper. I accidentally left it in a photocopy machine so I guess someone else got an A+ too. But Wimsatt regarded me as having learned some science. Which is why he was a good advisor: my new alchemy was hard science fiction written about abandoned paradigms; the new genre of historical science fiction.
Then I moved in next door to Muhammad Ali and knew fear and loathing in the City of Night. Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson was following me around with a tape recorder after I sent the ROLLING STONE a bizarre letter. It was about how Barney da Pimp had warned me of pro hit men hired by diverse Vadisystems. This was the first time I sailed the darkened seas in a great big Bobo Boat, the inevitable end-result of sailing too many submarines. You can read the true story of what actually happened in REALITY IS THE GREATEST. At heart, I am Moslem; at heart I am an American artist, and I have no guilt!
After three months in the Hotel Gonzo taking lithium and stelazine I was released. I rented an apartment just across from Harold's Chicken Shack. A good place for an attack of the munchies late at night smoking dem Rasta cigars with my biker buddies, Doc, Eric, and Bruce. Who ripped off my stereo, the ignorant bastards.
While I was still there, I started a novel called ARN, which is about this bald, blue race of aliens with four breasts who eat the brains of the dead to resurrect them. Wimsatt was so impressed, he showed it to Joel Snyder, who wanted to show it to Pulitzer prizewinner Norman MacLean. Even the highly venerated Invisible Hog cannot boast of being worth the attention of serious critics. ARN was not completed, though, until over a decade ago. I submitted it to ANALOG, got it back with an encouraging slip from Editor Stanley Schmidt, then became depressed and threw it in the garbage; my words abortions scattered among empty beer cans and cigarette buts. The current draft is rewritten from memory.
When I couldn't find a job or a place to stay in Nite City, I rode the Nova Express back to the Invisible landscape and moved back in with my Mother and my Father, who was dying of Alzheimer's disease. I did not cry at his funeral; it was not until writing BURN-OUT IN THE DOG-YUMMY FACTORY that I fully new my grief, and then I was laughing and crying at the same time.
As soon as I was back home, I thought, Bobo Boat books have become bestsellers in the past, why don't I turn my attention to fear and loathing in Nite City? So, I started an autobiography which, however, became an elaborate two thousand page-long porno fantasy when I went into another manic episode. And Dr. URL only had me on ten mgs. of stelazine on top of a fairly standard dose of lithium. Notorious for over-medicating, this time he had me as under-medicated as the infamous Dr. Day.
The story mutated into something called MINDSTORM when I spent a couple years at Interzone U. When I first arrived there, I was going thru a deep depression and nearly flunked out. Once the antidepressants kicked in, I became a straight-A student again, this time in the Religious Studies department. While there I showed the story to Earl Ganz, who suggested "cutting it, and turning the whole thing into a comic book about a swamp monster"--I'd included an actual hallucinatory scene in which I turned into the Slime-thing, the rollicking Rootboy, defender of truth, justice, and niceness.
And all cities are invisible for fifteen minutes. And how this great wealth came to be in the middle of this poverty is a marvel of marvels of cosmicomic literature, frequently Calvinoistic with elements resembling Borges, like Nicotine Tim, I was outside, looking in. As Jesus said in the Gospel of Thomas, If the mind came from the body it is a marvel. But if the body came from the mind, it is a marvel of marvels. But what I marvel at is how this great wealth came to be in the middle of this great poverty.
This link is an excerpted (and extremely dangerous) vision, torn straight out of the heart of cyberspace when Serendipity Systems published MINDSTORM as shareware. Unfortunately, a toy company took out a trademark on the name, and I'll probably have to change it to avoid a lawsuit. The new name is 21st CENTURY SCHIZOID MAN, and the Mindstorms are now "schiz-kriegs."
My writing career dissolved into fiction at this point, while schizophrenia took twenty years out of my life with little accomplished apart from chronic exacerbations of schizophrenia and rapid-cycling of my bipolar disorder. I was repeatedly hospitalized for short terms, lost all contact with the science fiction I'd loved as a youth and did nothing but torment my typewriter, obsessed with writing non-stop for Nobodaddy. Meanwhile my good Catholic Mother harassed me about my cigarette habit, never giving me more money than "exact change" for fear I'd buy a pack. She finally quit, though, when I jumped out a window and broke both feet, Apparently it shook her up to the point where she decided not to be so cruel to me. Happily, I eventually gave them up; I did it on nicorette.
The wrighting (full-brain CHAOS) I did during that period included FEAR AND LOATHING IN THE BATMOBILE, a true story of feral horror torn straight from the heart of the savage id. The Executive Editor of the NATIONAL LAMPOON assured me, "We all agree that this is totally hilarious, but it does not fit our needs at the present time."
WARNING: This story is full of assorted hot nasties. Parental discretion is advised.
The same thing goes for LADYTRON. She is a vampire who resurrects the dead by shivering their timbers and blowing their woodies. Though this was written at a much later period, the manic hypersexuality shows up in some real atomic oral sex. How great a fall for me, to become a purveyor of porn, when such great things had been predicted of me. Here also you see my obsession with oral sex which began with a demon Princess on the streets of Nite City while on acid, the vixen-foxen in her fake fox furs, twilight eye-shadow like a night that would never end. A mourning that would never begin.
...following Earl Ganz' declaration of it as being "extremely commercial, possibly a bestseller," When I did finally submit it to a publisher, it was returned with a note which said, "Although the concept is unique and the style is interesting, this is too far afield from what we usually publish. We print genre fiction. Most of the time." I tried three publishers of experimental fiction, but they asked me to "submit this thru a literary agent." After that, I gave up. I shouldn't have, but I did. Instead, the terror of the Mindstorms was abated; my mania finally fixed with valproic acid my inspiration ebbed and I lost the ability to write thirty pages a day. Now, however, I am busily sending out queries to agencies. Stay tuned for future installments, same Bat-channel, same fear and loathing.
I also had a brief fling at resuming school in Enterzone, before being ejected by Dean Big Ron Burnout for a suicide threat. I made the threat to Mary Sophia Prunikos after she'd used me to obtain the answers to her take-home final--she screwed me for the answers. The sex was real atomic; then she dumped me when she had her grade. Severely manic, I threatened suicide. Burnout declared it "malicious" and REFUSED to let me see the school psychiatrist. He dragged me to something called "Student Court," which should have been called Kangaroo Court. I was suspended for a year and never went back. Later on, he was sued for discriminating against the mentally ill. He has since graduated to other redneck asshole purviews.
I finally got my disability after three petitions and a trial. As soon as I had it, I holed up in the Space Capsule, the upstairs bedroom in my Mother's house; did nothing but write as the manic- depression tore me apart like love. My moods incessantly changed, violently, rapidly, my writing has finally been resurrected from the dread by a galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers and laughers.
Scoobyism--also known as the Scooby Club--is the religion called Narcoholics Numinous. The first time I joined the Invisible Scooby Club it was to have a social life and only for that reason as at the time the dope side of my dual diagnosis was pretty much under control. It isn't hard to fake being a Narcoholic by Scooby Club standards, one brewski is sufficient to convince them you need a Big Book and a Meeting.
Everything Scooby was fine, until I confessed to being on mental medication. Maybe some Scooby Clubs elsewhere are unlike the ones in the Invisible landscape, but the ones out here at the perimeter were constantly trying to convince me that I had a "pill habit" for taking prescription drugs; hypocrite collectors, they took medication for "physical" problems, but when it comes to mental health theyapparently take the rather ludicrous viewpoint that the mind has nothing to do with the body. That the Thirteen Steps are the only way to salvation in this Army of the damned. As that dork Mike Holst, my sponsor, put it, "You've got the Program now! Just work a Program on it!"
I quit in frustration following white death-rat suicide.
One Sunday morning at coffee and donuts after Mass, I met Jeffer Auss, who introduced me to the Scooby Club. I spoke of my glory days at Nite U, writing a Special Honors paper while sailing the darkened seas in a great big submarine. He felt I should attempt to Scoobify myself, while on the opposite side of the table George Two Ways sat. Or at least I thought I'd finally met my fictitious character in the flesh. I went to his nightmare hovel where I proposed a collaboration, INDIANS SCATTERED ON DAWN'S HIGHWAY, BLEEDING., the story of a parallel universe where the Indians put the white men on reservations. Fragile eggshells shattered by the closing of the Doors of Perception. A few years later, this became my first published work, after I submitted it to Serendipity Systems, who turned it into Bookware.
So then there was that first suicide attempt, which was to change my life permanently. I jumped from my bathroom window and broke both feet. The next day I was transferred from the Invisible Hospital to the one in Electric City on an ambulance. My Mother rode down with me. It was there that I met Trish the Dish when they stuck me on the psych ward after operating on my feet. Amazingly we met years later at Tournaments in Electric City when Perky Pam took us there for competiton in pool, ping-pong, checkers, chess and cribbage.
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