There was these two fellers talking one morning down at the courthouse, as I came upon them as I was stretching my legs. The night before was the stuff of comedy and astonishment. Years later I had a buttload of trouble accomplishing things, and at that time, I was genuinely trying to stay away from conflict (the struggle is indeed a struggle). In times of great struggle, well, that’s when the castles catch fire, and buildings slide and you can’t tell the phantoms from your next-door neighbors.

March 16, 2023

A friend and I were reminiscing about Murrell’s Inlet in South Carolina, where he had a job for two summers singing and playing guitar in the evening. He said, “I spent the summer of 1977 playing music under the live oak trees with Spanish moss hanging down and the sea at my back.” I said, “Yep, I was out there the year before, in the summer of 1976.” That’s when I left the employ of the Pride Steel Erection Company in Delphi, Indiana, and hitch-hiked down to Myrtle Beach, a few miles away.

It was a leisurely trip of two or three days – very slow for hitch-hiking, it seemed, or at least not very fast. I first got a ride from a born-again Gideon who told me Christ cured him from cussing, and then I got a ride from an amiable young trucker who enjoyed life on the road and ate Lemon Snap speed to keep awake and enjoy the scenery. He offered me one and I took one for later and then spit out the half tab that I stuck in my mouth after he left me. The next guy was driving a Volkswagen with a fat bag of Mexican dope in the glove box. He asked if I could roll a joint and I answered in the affirmative with a laugh. HA HA! Then we got to Corbin, Kentucky, and camped out in a campground right in the middle of town.

When I got to Murrell’s Inlet in the afternoon two days later, my friend wasn’t at the place yet, but a very nice young gal brought me an Old Style and I sat by the water and had the beer and I thought it was great to have a nice cold beer after two days of hitch-hiking – a nice lager that gave me a pretty good buzz. Then I asked the gal for another beer and she brought it out and said, “You know all the beer is near beer in South Carolina, don’t you?” Instantly I lost my buzz and thought, “Boy, that was a pretty good placebo effect.”

At the heart of the placebo effect is a belief that such and such is true: Here the belief is “Near beer will not get me high”; therefore when I find that I’m drinking near beer, the intoxication switch is turned off. It’s what you believe that determines the effect.

Generally speaking, in the psychological world, you invest what you see out there with meaning. That meaning may be good and be invested with good vibes, or it may be evil and emanate bad vibes, just as if those objects had these qualities in and of themselves.

Thus, back in my hippie days, when you were with a group of friendly people, everywhere there were good vibes, and everybody was pickin’ up good vibrations.

In like fashion the world could be full of bad trips too, like when you got the brown acid, and rather than becoming more and more expansive, the world began to darken, and the Blues Meanies ruled the land. And in that changed world, objects became imbued with evil – they soaked up the evil and emanated it back.

Thus it came to be that I believed physical objects could be almost radioactive in their evil. And then it came to be that my friend said to me one day, “You know that time you visited a year ago – around the 4th of July?” “Yeah – I remember – that was a good time.” “You know,” he says, “the whole time you were here, there was a rock from Auschwitz sitting in the corner.”

My jaw drops. “What???” “Yeah, Dave’s girlfriend was at Auschwitz and she picked up a rock and Dave left it here.” I said, “Huh.” He said, “I guess you didn’t pick up on any bad vibes.” “No, I guess not,” says I.

Maybe that rock just wasn’t at Auschwitz long enough to pick up the really bad vibes, or maybe I wasn’t sensitive enough to the vibes. Or maybe it’s another matter of belief, as in the placebo effect.

Real connoisseurs of the placebo effect can use the concept knowingly to cheer themselves up when they’re feeling down. This concept is called Psychic Bootstrapping or the Mindful Placebo. Here’s an example of the thought process: I have an old Rx for an antidepressant that I know doesn’t work, and even if there’s a *chance* it might work, that’s not going to happen for a good four weeks. However, I’m depressed and I need some relief right now. What the hell – why don’t I take a pill? Can’t hurt! And then son of a gun, I actually *do* feel better. It’s the Placebo Effect and you’re milkin’ for all it’s worth.

You know, as Cannonball Adderly says, sometimes we’re caught short by adversity, and we just want to say, “Oh mercy!” That time is now.

March 13, 2023

I got something at the Dollar Store yesterday, and the checkout gal allowed that her left hand was itching, which meant she was going to spend money. If it was her right hand that was itching, it meant that she would *receive* money. I allowed that when my right eye goes to jumpin’, I’ll get money for sho’, and when my left eye goes to jumpin’ somebody’s got to go.

https://youtu.be/aIkwAoWqE6E

Back in the early 70s I caught a sundown ride out of Albuquerque going, supposedly, all the way to St. Louis. It was a guy from ABQ who had talked with an old high school flame from STL and decided baby this is it, hang on ’cause I’m comin’. The deal was we would trade off driving until we got there. This is what people did before Facebook: They actually did crazy things like drive a thousand miles to see someone. Some people still do it.

We got started on the 8-hour trip toot sweet, and I was sleeping soundly when the tempo abruptly changed with a sudden slowdown. We came to rest under the harsh lights of a gas station, and I blinked my eyes open. “Where are we, man?” I said. The guy said, “Shamrock, Texas.” When I looked at him inquiringly he said, “Aw, I decided not to go all the way to St. Louis. I’m headed back to Albuquerque.” I barely had time to get out of the car before he peeled off with his tail between his legs. So much for love.

I guessed that was O.K. since I was at a Skelly truck stop and you could usually get a ride with a trucker. So I headed for the parking lot to look for anyone going to his rig. I was lucky because I saw a guy walking toward the trucks right away and I hollered at him, “Hey, man, you going east?” He turned around and I saw the Skelly patch on his jacket. “No, I ain’t going EAST,” he said in a really nasty way, “But YOU are! Get the hell outta town or I’m calling the sheriff!”

Well, I high-tailed it out to I-40, but it was a bad night for hitchhiking, and I ended up spending some lonely hours out there in the wee hours. Not many cars, and they all passed me by like I was trying to flag a ride at the Crossroads. Long about dawn a pickup truck slowed down and I got a ride. Hell of a nice guy who could take me just a few miles to the state line, where he had a bar to open up. Apparently they start drinking early in Texas.

As tired as I was, I wanted to get going as soon as I could, so I walked from the bar to a big WELCOME TO OKLAHOMA sign, but there still wasn’t much traffic, and I sat down on my duffel bag right at the base of the sign. Then I stretched out to catch a few winks. . . .

Again an abrupt awakening—this time it was a bunch of voices jabbering away in some foreign language—Japanese or Chinese for all I knew—it was all Oriental to me.* My only thought was that here was a ride. I struggled to my feet as the tourists surrounding me, or whoever they were, fluttered away like a flock of crows. One of the crows held a movie camera. As I said, “Hey, how about a RIDE??” the whole crew got into their car like a bunch of clowns, and they peeled out with me hollerin’ and the camera man in the back seat with his camera going all the while. I figured somewhere I would be in somebody’s home movie: “American Hippie.”

https://youtu.be/oGVJDX8XV5E

*This was before the change to “Asian.”

My brother Pat had a shitlist, or rather a reverse shitlist.

He was a loner by choice, and a proud one at that. He liked to hitch-hike, same as me, but we never did it together so as to have our own special experiences and then to report back to each other and compare notes.

The same patterns of interaction continued past the 70s and into our own trips – me a copy editor and Pat a housepainter back in the hometown. He was always alone. He was legally blind. He didn’t sleep – he would just lie down and listen to the radio all night long and sometimes record blues from Bloomington to send to me on cassette wherever I was – Champaign or Peoria or such.

But then I moved to Nebraska to escape some situation, and Pat helped me move. It was a great adventure on the way out and then he had a super great train ride and adventure on the way back to Illinois, meeting a couple women he knew in Iowa. Meanwhile I entered into a super duper lonely experience in Nebraska.

But let me tell you about the Reverse Shitlist. Well, sir, lots of people keep a list of contacts of some sort. Back then – the 90s – Pat kept a paper list of names and addresses and phone numbers of his friends around the country: old Knox College pals, our mutual friends, the names of girlfriends of other guys he liked a great deal, etc. And then every Sunday he wrote letters to a couple people on the list. He wrote great descriptive letters about the ordinary but noteworthy or funny things he saw every day in Streator. If he was writing to me, he’d include a cassette of blues tunes or some old 50s tunes all on a nice mixtape. I would always respond in kind with pictures and a cassette from my hiking and camping adventures in Nebraska. We were each other’s mutual support and it certainly got me through many a rough time.

But it wasn’t the same for other folks on Pat’s list: If the person didn’t respond with a letter or phone call within a certain reasonable amount of time, he would just take them off the list – run a line through them and then periodically update the whole list. In effect he was creating a virtual shitlist – the people remaining on the list were on the Reverse Shitlist. Sometimes a person would be restored to the list if they finally sent a letter, but otherwise zip! Delete! When I was visiting, I would watch him do his letter writing and list updating. He would laugh, and we’d both laugh. And sometimes we’d burst into song:

There she was justa walkin’ down the street
Singin’ Do Wah Diddy Diddy Um Diddy A

Boy, those were the greatest times. I loved my brother and he loved me. It was the screwiest thing in a family where no one ever said, “I love you” or treated you like a human being. I am probably exaggerating, or maybe not – I’m sure there was no malicious intent – but in such an environment it’s really important to have somebody you can count on, and for me that was Pat. When he died suddenly in 1995 and I went through his very minimal effects (he kept hardly anything) I found the Reverse Shitlist, the last list of his very best friends – who called or wrote him back. And there were a lot of people on the list, enough for an SRO funeral. One guy even got into a car crash (nothing serious) on his way down from Chicago. All friends, all on the Reverse Shitlist.