Confessions, Part 3

London, Sunday, 25 August, 1974

Little Danny Diggs had scarcely finished his platinum-plated polystyrene Popsicle when his harried mother appeared like quicksilver in the doorway of their freeway-modern American suburban complex apartment. It had been raining in San Diego ever since the top of the charts as I lifted the obese obsidian door knocker. For the past two years, ever since urban renewal facilitated the arrival of all those geeks into our previously off-white neighborhood, we have had to keep our doors and windows tightly bolted. Then it happened. The Church of Jewish Scientists moved in and the place became infested with trichina. Our babies became the target of severe Kosher circumscription. Oil depletion allowances made deep frying poignantly obsolescent. A cool winter's breeze shattered the morning silence as star-crossed lovers locked in energetic consternation.

London, Monday, 26 August, 1974 “Bank Holiday”

Gerald Ford's “confidence of his conservatism is like an amiable Tory backbencher from the Shires.”

“It is evil to fart during Beethoven's Ninth” -- Anthony Burgess

The gospel according to St. Fudd states that molecules with a valence of greater than three times the circumference of the Earth's midriff will expand when heated. Others reproduce quadraphonically, without benefit of conjugal byplay.

Thursday, Sept. 5, 1974

The lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer inexorably relinquish their hold on the consciousness of mortal man and give way to the tepid dog days of September memories. English schoolchildren wend their weary way back to the folds of educational dogma and try to learn their reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic (and to keep a stiff upper lip, stand in queues, sip tea, spend a penny, take the tube, go to the loo, pip pip, cheerio, and all 'at) whilst the cosmic seasonal cycle plays its never-ending game of Bulgarian roulette with the holy grid outside their two-way perforated windowpanes. All the masses (are asses) of multitudes of hitherto ignominious royal subjects prepare to cast their predetermined lot with the Labour, Conservative (Tory), or Liberal (birthday) parties in the forthcoming Parliamentary elocutions. The young liberals want to eliminate the need for compulsory jobs for all citizens and like good social democratic commie fascist jew bastards, seek to eliminated the armed forces which after all are only the corporeal manifestation of the pointless ego-trip of a war oriented economic inflationary nightmare of the body politic of a push-button no deposit no return throw-away automotive smog-ridden computer punch-card televised society.

Scene 3 – Welcome to the future. It's just starting now.

Our society has no classes, except in the collage or multiversity of your choice. The means of production are held by all the people. Yes, we have them all – uppers, downers, beaners, boogies, all in living colour 'cuz everything looks worse in black and white. At last the binding shackles of the by now moribund mediacracy have been recklessly cast aside and the anxious androids of both remaining planets can live in harmony, melody, and various contrapuntal intonations. Methodists and religious ecstatics of all indoctrinations can rest their retinas daily on the channel of their choice, both commercial and educational.

One organism, one vote!
All power to the pimple!
Up with megahertz!
Ché lives!
Free Morton Kaiser!!
Fold, spindle, mutilate!

Yes, dear friends out there in Medialand. The biosphere is awash with maxims, slogans, flying, bouncing and ricocheting like McLuhanian ping pong balls off the Van Allen belt which shrouds our multiverse. Pharynxes, larynxes, epiglottises, eject sonic microwaves by the score. Blackboards, bathroom walls, car bumpers – every centimetre of available space – graffiti (the writing on the wall, for both of you non-Italians) proclaim the good word, once heard only by a small band of evolutionaries but now by that ever-increasing number of zealots who march to the beat of a different drummer.

The medium is the massage. (Medium, hell – I'll take an extra large.)

Welcome to the Age of Epic Proportions

Confessions, Part 2

London, Saturday, Aug. 24, 1974

Now that you are comfortable, let me continue. I spend most of my time walking the heath and the streets of Hampstead. The streets curl and swerve as if they were dropped from a high-flying dirigible. A right. A left. A right. A left to the body and into a petrol station (Texaco or Blue Star. No Nixxon.) Small shops spring up in rows on both sides of the narrow cobbled streets. High Street, Pond Street, Heath Street have changed very little since that infamous time in prerecorded history when they changed the water. I can imagine some famous writer from a now-forgotten era sipping a shot of grog in the gloamin' outside historic Freemasons Arms public house. Keats, an amateur extinguished poet, lived in one of the small Hampstead houses, and a contemporary restaurant bears his name.

Q. “What's a Grecian urn?
A. “About 3.14 surnotex a week.” Classic!

The shops sell everything from soup to nuts, including mock turtle soup and Beatle nuts. There are Mac Fisheries (a chain), trendy boutiques, fruiterers, chemists, supermarkets (much smaller than their American counterparts), camera shops, schlock shops, record shops, etc. etc. To shop, you pull a small two-wheeled trolley behind you as you make a purchase at one of the shops. [Illiterate – Ed.] Dogs and cats line the streets and have free access to the stores. It is not unusual to stub a prehensile toe on a misplaced mongrel upon reentry or possible splashdown.

For the first time in many a gibbous harvest moon, I have been looking at life through the 55 mm dilated aperture of my camera. Somehow life seems more reel that way. Silver nitrate breeds two-dimensional relativity. As the ambient light is reflected continuously between the polar coordinates of the focal plane, the phase shifts from the real to the imaginary. This is the natural scheme of things. It cannot be changed.

I will continue if and when my left ankle returns from hibernation in the Isle of Wight, if it's not too dear, honey. Groovy and out. Ten-four Eleanor.

Dept. of Psychosomatic History
Dept. of Psychoanalytic Predetermination

Confessions of a Lactobacillus Bulgaricus Eater*

(* or How to Cultivate Yoghurt in Your Spare Time for Fun and Profit)

London, Saturday, Aug. 24, 1974

This is England. At this very instant in that ghost-written script that is our lives our insipid explorer sits at a small neo-plasticine table outside a pub in the same subterranean nation that spawned such postoperative luminaries as Shakespeare, Keats, Dickens, Drake, Churchill, Newton, John, and McCartney.

The spiritual and creative implications of this intellectual climate are too numerous to enumerate.

The sands of time slip inexorably through the treadmill of my day-to-day existence here, and before I know it, I've been here a week.

Of the many cars which dot the arteries of organic England, I have only seen four which have borne American brands: a Pontiac Firebird 400, Corvette Stingray, Chrysler, and last and certainly not least, a baby-blue Lincoln Continentalac. These bicarbonated behemoths belong here as much as a lady wrestler at a Girl Scout cookout. Mother is debating whether or not to rent a Mini (or generic equivalent) to take a tour of the North Counties and maybe Scotland. This would be fun if I could ever get used to driving on the wrong side of the road. (And the Hebrews do it backwards, which is absolutely frightening.) Damned clever, those Chinese.

The weather has been brightly sunny and in the 70s (using the antiquated Farenthold barometer) for the past four days. Nobody here can believe this. They tell me that it usually rains with great regularity and frequency even in the summer, so the benign benevolence of our maker the mad molecule is indeed welcomed. (As these very words leaked from the barrels of my quadri-colored pen, a torrential downpour of wisdom erupted, washing out the cosmic contact lenses of our infant king and his uncle the adenoid.)

“Trite but urbane, trenchant, and enlightening.” -- The California Independent Observer

To revert at once to the student idiom: Reject the recording, fold, spindle, mutilate. Then (if all else fails) reverse directions.