A Hippy Grows in Graceland

Et Two, Blue Tao?

          In his trips he had always noticed that there were myriads of little unidentifiable thingies here and there.  Spots on the wall or in the air seemed to have legs, tendrils, tentacles that reached and sensed and quested.  They would appear and disappear at random.  They seemed a combination of animal and plant, like the sci-fi aliens in the book (and movie) The Day of the Triffids.  Bubba christened them "pinoobrias", deciding that they varied in type and size all the way from virus-level, up through triffid-size, to gargantuan alien beings that sent out tendrils to different dimensions.

          In fact, they lived in the interfaces between worlds.  That's why some people could see them when tripping, because they were hovering at the edge of our reality, waiting for an opportunity to leech off energy from humans who ventured too close to the edge of the Garden of Consensus Reality.  He could catch a glimpse of the smaller ones once in awhile.  The larger ones could only be perceived by the ripples they made in the fabric of reality.  Or by their curious, cautious scritching at the back of your consciousness in moments of distraction.

          One chill winter night in the back yard at Hivad Commune, he heard several titanic pinoobrias flying by overhead, one-by-one.  They were invisible, of course, but their passage sounded like the rush of the wind far ahigh, and he could see a huge "V" shape in the cloudless stuff of night sky, like the wake of a ship on the ocean, each time he heard the rushing sound.  He was perfectly sober that night.  He shivered and went back inside.

          Bimeby, there was no place he felt perfectly safe.  The modern buildings in the city and on campus all seemed to be the insides of giant computers, filled with GMC zombies.  The old houses in Midtown were haunts of the alien pinoobrias, whom he thought might be allies of the GMC.  The woods were full of Lord-knows-what.  Oftimes he was afraid to go to sleep, especially at the end of a trip.

          He was beyond the point where logic would help; it only made things worse.  After all, there was no easy way to prove his paranoia wrong through logic.  Never argue logic with an intelligent paranoiac; he's got it all worked out already.  Argument to absurdity is no effective objection to the schizophrenic, to whom nothing may be too absurd to believe.  And he didn't hear a peep from religion.  He couldn't get out of the labyrinth on his own, and no help from Outside was in sight.

          This state of drug-induced schizophrenia intensified until it reached a peak while he was living with Lilith.  It was then, though, after two 3-4-day nightmares triggered by unknown entheogens, after the two of them were kicked out of the Hivad Commune for failing to pay their $10/month rent, that mundanity began to sneak back into his mind.  Working at a plastics extrusion plant, along with living on grilled-cheese sandwiches and Colt 45 malt liquor, tended to make mundanity difficult to ignore.

          After he'd broken up with Lilith and returned to school to get his BA, the schizophrenia slowly began to recede.  He finally graduated in 1973.  When he moved to Rivendell Commune with Aramie in 1974, he was still far from Mundania.  But by then he'd quit taking tab acid and was only tripping on Clear Light Windowpane.  His schizophrenic impulses had entered into more positive occult frameworks that included reincarnation and Gnostic Christianity.  Certainly, one of the major reasons he'd moved to the Ozarks was fear that the entire southern portion of the USA would sink into the sea, perhaps at the behest of a nuclear attack, but he no longer feared meeting pinoobrias or GMC agents at the turn of every corner.  Evil spirits there might be, but they were neither all-powerful nor all-knowing. 

          Speaking of which, Richard Milhous Nixon was in the process of dancing a buck-and-reel to avoid getting impeached.  That proved there was a God in Heaven!  Perhaps a psychic tide of some sort was turning.