The Last extract of all... From The Telling Stones..
"....just like I remembered from some Robert Crumb cartoon. I
thought he just made it look like that, but it is real.
I went walking to find Ashbury, looking along it for
Haight. At first the wrong way – a long way – and finally
asked at a corner liquor store. All corners have ‘likker’ stores,
each one run by some person looking middle eastern. How
are they treated since 9/11? I wondered.
As I moved toward the corner of Haight and Ashbury
Streets, I was excited, really felt like some sort of pilgrim.
There it was, a corner in a city…nobody there at all. I took a
photo and went into the shop on the corner, a sort of a head
shop but it was almost all shirts. I chatted to the guy, who
told me he’d been 30+ years there and business was fine.
There were artefacts of sorts; stickers to display on your
car, and mostly in that script I call “Acid writing”. Mostly
good. I bought a Grateful Dead T-shirt and spoke of them
a while, of their integrity in the day and through the years.
The house they lived in was just up the road. Why not
look? I remembered Phil Lesh speaking in front of it sometime
on TV – good stories.
A couple of hundred yards up the hill there it was, 710
Ashbury Street, a nice little inner city house with a set of
steps up. The gate post had “If my words did glow” and
“Thank you Jerry” in black marker. I was blown away for
some reason in that soft feeling place, a centre of subcultural
evolution. Felt like a power place that fills the senses and
feeds the soul. Stronger than Sedona.
I took photos at the gate.
A 4WD drove into the attached garage, and the man
driving smiled as he went in. As he came from the car to the
front of the house with parcels, I asked,
“Does all this drive you crazy?”
“No. Such nice kids most of them. It happens all the
time.”
I asked “What happens?”.
“They say, it’s Jerry’s place, and I say, no, it’s mine now.”
“They sound too young to have been Sixties kids.” I say.
He went on. “We bought a couple of years after. It was
empty and a real mess, lots of little cubbies and ruined bedding.
We fixed it over the years and always there were people
coming to see it. Outside, sitting, on the day he died there
were a thousand there mourning I’m sure.”
I marvelled at his patience. His own home a shrine for
Deadheads and he had no affiliation; yet all he sees is nice
kids.
At one time there were TV interviews on the house after
Jerry had left, and he was sent tickets by the Dead to a concert.
He said he loved it. So many people, having such a lot
of fun, “and the music was nice too”.
“I am jealous,” I said, as I missed the concerts. He put the
parcels on the car.
There was a Rumi calendar diary dog-eared under his
arm. I pointed. “One of my favourite people,” I said........"
And from The Mad Bastards Guide to Enlightenment...
Drugs.
".....All is welcome in consciousness. All and everything.
With drug use the process is reversed, the physiology
is changed and the view of the world changes accordingly.
Temporarily. In itself an experience of something apparently
greater.
But.
The body takes a smacking. And if the drug is made by
amateurs, then who knows what extras are there? If not,
then there is doubt that the entire effect is known. This is a
subtle science, if it is science at all, and twisting the physiology
to shape conscious perception in this way looks brutal
and unnecessary. It costs the body, and then after, there is
recovery and attempts at integration on a massive scale. The
perception of what is real can become suddenly a long and
non-integrated distance from where it was yesterday. All so
that a twisted out physiology can produce the fantastic ideas
the unconscious holds away. Including whatever you think
the beyond might be.
Now it seems possible that under certain conditions and
“expert” supervision, that the experience can loosen cultural
ties, adjust decently and be a useful trigger toward reality..
But I see no such experts. A small number of talented amateurs
and a lot of collateral damage.
I have had bliss and silence from chemical interference,
and it is not the same. It isn’t real in the sense that awake is.
A momentary gift from the subtle mind. And the wrapping
is crap. I look at......"
