Bill Hicks

Video Finds of the Day

Thanks to homelessness and too much poverty (more than now) I had no opportunity to know of Bill Hicks while he was alive. I learned of him for the first time from my daughter, of all people. I can't tell you how proud of her I was after I checked him out. Later we agreed that it was more evidence that she was my spawn, in addition to the eyes.

bill hicks drugs and music



Bill Hicks - Play From Your Fucking Heart

A Heaping Helping of Abuse

Yesterday I attended a Single Adults Committee meeting. The Single Adults Committee, or SAC, is a population subcommittee of a subcommittee of the Committee to End Homelessness in King County, or CEHKC, which began working on King County's Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness in 2004, and therefore if that title meant what it promised, homelessness in King County will be non-existent in 2014.

In fact, there has never been any intention to end homelessness in ten years. That is not the plan. That is just the name of the plan. The plan is something else. I'll get to that later. Right now I want to bitch about something that happened yesterday.

As I say, I attended the committee. I'm an actual official member of the committee. I received an actual invitation to be an actual member of the committee. The committee has between 22 and 25 members. About 20 of them are service providers or social and health services functionaries for the city or the county, including the county hospital, Harborview. The remaining 2 to 5 members who show up each month are us Consumers.

That's what they call those of us who are or have been homeless as single adults. We are called Consumers, as in "consumer of services targeting homelessness."

Let me explain how offensive that is. The token 2 to 5 people selected to appear to represent the single adult homeless community while having their numbers deliberately kept low so they can't have any real power are DEFINED SOLELY IN TERMS OF THEIR RELATIONSHIPS TO THE REAL POWER IN THE ROOM.

Well, fuck us. Fuck us to hell.

They make nice about it, they really do. They pay a couple of us a stipend of $20 every third visit. If it's one of the meetings where only one other Consumer shows up I get the $20. If two other Consumers show up I usually get bumped because they only alloted stipends for two Consumers on the committee, which means that 2 or 3 of us are bonus tokens. I appreciate the thought behind that, seriously.

But I'm still digressing. Yesterday one of the service providers connected with DESC (the people who house me in addition to running the Downtown Emergency Service Center shelter) was talking about how hard it can be to keep chronically homeless people in transitional and permanent housing because they fail due to issues. She was mainly speaking in connection with women I think. Someone said what issues, please list some, and she listed some and one of the issues was "the boyfriend."

Now, I was already in a snippy mood, because only just minutes earlier the same woman had talked about the need for programs where women can live in group situations permanently, and I was remembering how just four years ago we had Noel House providing just that, and promising just that, and the promise was broken. Because the people in charge decided they knew better than the residents what was best for them.

So I thought I might not have heard right, because my mind had been clouded with a snippy fog. So I asked. She said that yes, she said boyfriends. She said that, you have to understand, she was using the term "boyfriends" lightly.

It's probably not a good idea to use the clause "you have to understand" when talking to a mathematician. I am trained to push back hard when I am told what I have to understand. I don't have to understand. You have to explain yourself. I'll understand when you've done your job.

But I ignored that, because I have also been trained in civility. I said that I could see an opportunity here for having more success keeping people in housing. You could arrange the living experience in a way that accommodated the boyfriends.

She said that wouldn't be a good idea. The boyfriends are often abusers and violent and often they are drug suppliers. And I started to ask what accommodations do you make when you don't know that domestic violence or drug supply is an issue, when I was told that it is always considered a bad idea to maintain a relationship when someone is trying to get off drugs.

So here's the deal. I was mistaken about the whole program. I thought the goal was to get people in housing, and that the question was, how do we do that effectively. Instead I find out that the goal is to get them off drugs at all costs, even if they don't want off them.

I find out that the goal of the Ten Year Plan has been taken over by the Missionaries, and that the homeless are the Indians. This woman and her 20 cohorts around the table are the Missionaries who decided that tribal culture was corrupting Native children, who had to be isolated and raised apart from their parents.

They're also the Missionaries who told us that Noel House had to be made temporary for the good of its Consumers. It doesn't matter that now the Missionaries are saying that group living is a good thing, the point is, they're the ones defining the good.

She's not saying that the woman who goes back to her "boyfriend" whatever he is, doesn't want to go back to him. No, she wants to but the Missionary has decided for her that she shouldn't.

Over a hundred years after Native American children were stolen from their own people Missionaries are trying to pry drugs and alcohol from them and not doing penance for being the ones that drove them to those alternatives in the first place.

Missionaries,

You break up the only social ties that people have, call their chosen relationships sick and abusive, and you replace them with a sick, abusive, insulting, demeaning, "Consumer" relationship. Go ahead do it, that's what you've been doing. Why not? You're the vanguard, you're the elite YOU KNOW WHAT'S BEST FOR EVERYBODY.

OK, admittedly, you don't know what the new symptoms will be. The chief symptoms of meddling in the Native American's culture were widespread alcoholism and their own subsequent particularly high rate of homelessness. You don't know what the new symptoms will be of the new artificial Consumer relationships you are creating among all the current homeless people you are ripping apart to house. But you KNOW , because you are so fucking superior, that the new symptoms will be something you can cure when they materialize and you get around to them. In the meantime, you can live with yourselves, because you're so fantastic.

The OK Generation

At the unveiling of the Martin Luther King Jr. logo for King County, one of the speakers made it sound like Baby Boomers made the sixties civil rights movement happen. This reminds me once more of one of my pet peeves.

There seems to be two general opinions regarding this Baby Boomer Generation of mine. They are both wrong.

The first wrong view is that we were glorious idealists who brought about the end of segregation and ended an evil war.


The second wrong view is that we are and were a bunch of spoiled brats who, in our endlessly selfish quest for new kicks and turn ons and toys and debauched sex and rock & roll, are responsible for everything that is currently wrong with America, including but not limited to AIDS, crack, meth, crack whores, too much sex, too little sex, American Idol, SUVs, wussy foreign imports, The Dixie Chicks, Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, delaying the fall of soviet communism, causing the fall of soviet communism, Clinton's blowjobs, making Reagan look good, making George Bush look good, George W Bush himself, rap, the Christian Right, LaRoucheys, besmirching liberalism, bringing liberalism into being, too much Monty Python on KCTS, Trekkies, and you can't get good weed [pussy / acid / shrooms] anymore, they used it all up between '67 and '71, and now all the weed [pussy / acid /shrooms] smells like burro butt.

A big load of duck drip.


Contrary to everything you've been told, Baby Boomers did not all march with Martin Luther King Jr. They did not become Freedom Fighters en masse. They did not even rally against the Vietnam war to the degree the media at the time portrayed. When Seattle had its Freeway March against the war, the march was well publicized in advance at UW. Five thousand students participated, which the local news played up as if it were a youth revolution in the making. But there were over 30,000 students enrolled at UW at the time. 85% of all UW students sat that one out. 85% OR MORE of all Boomers everywhere in the land sat almost everything out you've read about.


Boomer drug use was no greater than that of the Roaring Twenties, when the drug war really got started, with what was seen through the distortions of the media of that era as an "epidemic" of heroine addiction. The popularity of weed was well known to boomers as having been firmly entrenched among the Beats, who were not Boomers, and the Beats knew they were copying behaviors stereotypic of participants of the Harlem Renaissance. The free sex was definitely more free back then owing to the lack of AIDS, which we did NOT invent or cause, but it was also more free in every earlier generation, as long as no one talked about it. And who talked about it when we did it? The media.

Now I will tell you the real achievement of the Baby Boomer Generation. Every generation before us had been bad mouthed in the media of their day. But none of them before had to grow up in a television age with only 3 or 4 channels, in the middle of an explosion of knowledge about psychological manipulation.

Advertisers used the fact that they could mount focused hot media blitzes on the few channels to reach all of us cheaply. TV was at its utmost effective. It was more immediate than radio. It was less fragmented than now and the internet didn't compete with it. While our own government researched and experimented with psychological operations techniques inspired by the KGB, the Nazi propaganda machine, and Chinese brainwashers, to wage the Cold War, those techniques filtered down to the corporations that collaborated with the government and the military and they deliberately employed them to manipulate the general public.

[Shown: A US Psy Ops insignia adopted in 1967, for the 5th Psychological Operations Battalion.]

The chief tool in all this was the same systematic perversion of normal human socialization that made the Milgram experiments work. The advertisers told us day after day we had to get our parents to buy us the next thing that ever body is going to have to have. Be the first kid on your block... don't be left out... So I got chaps, and toy six-shooters at one point. At another point I had to have a coon-skin cap like Davy Crockett, or I would be a disgrace. Hula Hoops and Frisbees became necessities. Not knowing the latest hit dance was taboo. Learn the dance, buy the single.

Then the civil rights movement made serious headway, thanks mainly to older heads. About that time growing numbers of Boomers caught on to what was happening all at once. There was already a large literature on the dangers of conformity. But Boomers figured out that something more insidious than mere undirected conformity was happening. It wasn't undirected.

There was a common feeling, that emerged over the course the second half of the sixties, that the civil rights movement was all about making the US a place where you could be free to be Black, i.e., a place where you could be free to do what you had no other choice but to do, but that it was remaining a place where, thanks to government meddling & demands of employers and schools & reactionary social pressures bolstered by media in the pocket of corporations, there was barely any freedom to make choices.

The absurdity of the situation first became evident when the same media that brought us the Beatles, also portrayed us as dangerous filthy radical revolutionaries when our guys started copying the Beatles and growing their hair longer. Today it may all seem silly, but remember that we Boomers grew up being told that WWII was fought to make us free. If my freedom is only to wear a crewcut and slacks uniform & if a simple frivolous choice like choosing to grow my hair two inches longer than boot camp style is going to get me branded as an enemy of the state and I'm not going to be able to get a job and my school is going to suspend me, what's going to happen to me if I choose to do something significant that isn't universally approved? I'm only free to do what 100% of America says I can?

So a bunch of us tested that out. And we found out you could get your skull cracked if you did virtually anything out of line. Like for instance oppose a war instead of support it.

The opposition to the Vietnam War was partly about the draft. It was partly about the war itself, that it went on too long and it was pointless. But deep down it was a generation's test of the promise of freedom in this country, and the country failed. "You call this a free country and say we have free speech, but when I take you up on that and exercise my right to speak out against the war, you call up the National Guard." It was a test. It was about an entire generation being told that you're free to be any color you happen to be, but don't let it go to your heads.

So we let it go to our heads. There were excesses, but bear in mind that the excess were all committed by a minority. The only thing the general majority of Boomers had in common was that we all knew how absurd the media's coverage of it all was. That was the glue that held us together.

The sense of the absurdity of the media's manipulation of us coupled with its simultaneous stereotyping around the outcomes of its manipulations, was encapsulated in the ironic phrase, "Stop making sense." The media was trying to make our sense for us. Even people who didn't do drugs, like me, knew what it was the drug use was rebelling against. Everyone was looking for another channel, one that wasn't owned and programmed by the Man.

Then, in the late sixties, Boomers learned how to turn the tables on the corporations and the government and the media, by using the power of the media itself, stealing the show and exploiting the media right back.

Our great achievement was half shaking off the media's grip on us. We didn't completely shake them off. But we made a start. And every generation after us has had it that much easier to see through the media lies about them and to shake off the continuing efforts to manipulate them. Because we created a template of attitudes and tricks to cope.

John Cunningham Lilly

At the lunch Wednesday for Robert (Mexican Lunch -- Tahitian Music, posted Feb. 28) the topic of conversation turned, as it often does when you have two hippy-aged old farts like Robert and me in the room, to the question, "What kinds of drugs did you do, or can't you remember?" People are often surprised to learn, especially after reading my writing, but also after looking at me, that I have never done any hallucinogens whatsoever. To excuse myself for that, I always mention the natural auditory and visual hallucinations I had during that little teenage psychotic episode of mine, that convinced me that I shouldn't do those kind of drugs for the same reason I shouldn't smoke while pumping gas.

Then, to explain why I didn't change my mind and try some acid or mescaline in graduate school, say, when the psychosis would have been far enough behind me as to encourage my native recklessness, I mention the caution inspired by the story of John Lilly, the great dolphin scientist and famed acid-neuronaut . When I did this at our lunch only Anitra, who is exactly eight days younger than myself, knew of whom I was speaking. I expected Robert wouldn't know, even though, as I've said, he's about my age, because Robert isn't that into the details of the Persian Carpet of Life, so to speak. Except for Tim Harris, our Director, I thought youth and 9-11 excused the rest of the party for not knowing who Lilly was. Most of his celebrity was achieved before they were born, and the fact that he picked 19 days after 9-11 to die meant there wasn't the usual national 5 minutes of obituary for the old guy that might have clued the younger generation in.

But when Tim didn't know I have to say I was a little surprised. Here's a guy whose blog (Apesma's Lament) is named for a Captain Beefheart lyric. He's posted a medical illustration of an extended hemorrhoid on said site, as well as a 5-7-6 Haiku. So he NEEDS to know who John Cunningham Lilly was and still is. Therefore I am talking about that.


















In this picture, found on a web page titled "John C. Lilly Community of One Love" we see, from left to right, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and John C. Lilly, hanging out in 1991. This gives you one idea who he was.


Another way you can get an idea of him is to read the fourth book of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy. Chapter 31 of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish introduces a character called Wonko the Sane, and named John Watson, who lives in the outside part of an inside-out house called Outside the Asylum (the inside part being the part the rest of us are living in.) The Wonko character is obviously an amalgam of about 80% John C. Lilly with about 20% James Watson (of Watson and Crick.) John C. Lilly was the dolphin scientist of the two. But both had interests in neurology.

Lilly was the one guy most responsible for the popular notion that if Cetaceans aren't really really smart, they're at least like, really sensitive, and wise. One of the things he worked hard on, besides attempting to learn how dolphins talk to one another so we could join in their conversations, was at understanding how dolphins see with sonar. Lilly came to the think that dolphins and whales have the neurological capacity and the sensory equipment necessary to see in sonar not only in stereo (like we do with our eyes) but in true 3-D. The difference between stereo and true 3-D is the difference between seeing the surfaces of your surroundings and seeing the insides as well. John Lilly arrived at the tentative conclusion that dolphins could see the workings of each others internal organs and so could read moods and feelings off internal states. He realized that if true this could make understanding a dolphin language beyond all human capacity because we could never grasp its context. We don't have any way to relate to that kind of continuous unrelenting intimacy.

These ideas spawned the best Star Trek movie with the original cast ever, IV, The Voyage Home, with humpback whales in place of dolphins. We also got Day of the Dolphins, sadly.

Before trying to understand the different ways another species might conceptualize reality as a context for communication, Lilly thought of going back to square one and seeing what happens when you remove the context altogether. That was the gist of the idea of sensory-deprivation tanks. Lilly may not have been the first to think of exploring sensory-deprivation, but he made it work. He solved the engineering problems and he wrote about his experiments and fired the public up about it. That got us Altered States and at least one Simpson episode.

Lilly's involvement with LSD was big-time. Like Timothy Leary, John Lilly's career was begun in league with the CIA and the Military-Industrial Complex. The military probably funded his earliest research, which involved mapping brain activity on cathode ray tubes. The sensory deprivation research began in 1954. By the early sixties Lilly was incorporating LSD in his sensory-deprivation experiments. The LSD was provided by the CIA as part of a project called MK-ULTRA.

In MK-ULTRA, also called MKULTRA, and later MKSEARCH, the MK apparently stood for Mind Kontrol. Maybe they wanted to avoid MCULTRA for fear their acronym would end up on a fast-food menu. Anyway MK-ULTRA was all about the CIA's attempt to discover cool new ways to manipulate people's minds. MK-ULTRA research included sensory-deprivation studies from the outset, and they may have funded all of Lilly's 1950s experiments on that. But by the sixties they were definitely supporting Lilly.

I don't think Lilly took part in it himself, but some of the other research involving sensory-deprivation for the CIA explored its use as a means of enhancing the impact of psychological torture.

I read about Lilly's work with dolphins before I got to graduate school. By the time I got to grad school, Lilly had written Centre of the Cyclone, which documents his LSD experimentation, both official and personal. One of his stories details a singularly bad trip in which he saw his wife as a hairy ape and freaked out. That was enough to convince me that I didn't want the stuff, because I was looking to get laid, and didn't need those sorts of complications. Reading the book I got the impression that Lilly was pretty scared by the whole thing.

It must not have scared him too much though, because not much later he was back at it, this time with ketamines. He is reported to have tried to warn President Ford at one point that computers were trying to take over the world.

By the end of his life Lilly had his own website, so he must have decided to stop fearing the computers and learn to communicate with them from within their own frameworks. Lilly lives on at that website.