Kerry Thornley - The Dreadlock Recollections

V

What is so weird is to think there is this Iranian Prince somewhere, right? Who has known me all my life! Who has been there when I was fucking, when I was conning, when I was wiping my ass, getting stoned, who knows me inside and out, every wrinkle. If not an Iranian Prince, then somebody else. Same thing. Somebody I've never even met, that I don't know the first thing about. What do you do about somebody like that? I don't even know whether to love them or hate them.

The morning after: They just wanna complain they are all so confused. They are feeling so used. Tell 'em I ain't to blame. Tell 'em I wasn't there when we decided what's fair. I was combin' my hair and I was sniffin' the air. Little Five Points is a sample example of the absurd behavior conspirators expect in this 208th year since the Declaration in America. I'm supposed to spend most of my time in the Point, where the only benevolent servants heart and soul of the people are in charge. I'm supposed only to enter the pub after or immediately before spreading the word about what I've written elsewhere. I'm never, ever supposed to enter the Rainbow, because that makes me a dirty puritan ridden with sex guilt.

For a number of years I have been ignoring these Soviet travel restrictions. When I'm hitchhiking and broke they can still control me by refusing to give me spare change in front of this or that Pancake House or Denny's or MacDonald's. Usually what I get instead is a long lecture by a talkative patron who at the end gives me maybe two nickels and then I can sit there from hell to doomsday and expect nothing but accusing stares.

To the best of my financial ability, since getting wise, if not healthy and wealthy, by slavishly paying attention for a couple of years (1979–1980) to advice like that, I've been ignoring all unsolicited anonymous free advice, figuring it was worth exactly what I was paying for it. Do you think that stops them? Not on a bet. They continue automatically, mechanically cranking it out as if they actually think I'm listening. Not only about where I should drink my coffee, either. About when I should jack off in public or when I should jack off in private with only the video cameras concealed (presumably) on my person watching and when I should jack off under the covers without letting the folks at Jet Propulsion Laboratories (or wherever those Nixonite bastards are) realize it is happening.

They also presume to advise me about what to write and what to say, punishing me if I express opinions they didn't need that time. Then there are people who think I am king or who at least imagine wildly and recklessly that I'm a free man. On top of all that, not content with the claustrophobia they've visited upon my already traumatized psyche, they seek to intensify it by pretending to me that they think I'm slyly and cleverly (oh, Kerry, you crafty devil) communicating instructions or advice to them about matters of which I'm next to wholly ignorant when I scratch my ass or order scrambled eggs or tie my backpack strings in square knots, etc.

The way I figure it is somewhere there is a mediocre bureaucrat who wants to be able to say he or she was only following orders when the axe falls. And since Richard Nixon got the CIA to sign innumerable orders about me without first reading them, I'm what can be passed off as as good a source of authority as any. Only trouble being that when I was giving orders I was a raving communist anarchist, who thereby made it hard to solicit contributions of cartels and corporations to finance the holy wars that are, to them, the true purpose of life, against Catholics and Muslims. After all, why try to cause social progress when with half the effort you can revert the whole world to a series of feudal dynasties killing one another's slaves over whether or not three or one angels can stand on the head of a pin, whether God has co-partners and what are the most tasteful ways to perform sexual intercourse? That way you can remain invisible and not have to spend a lot of money on PR because everybody will be looking at one another instead of the staff of Station K., as Colin Wilson calls it in a book by that name.

When I become deaf and blind to my true duty to walk on one side and not another of a crack in the sidewalk I'm not supporting whatever the hell I'm otherwise being used for, sometimes called a "house," called anything but a conspiracy and never even passed off in jest as a mass movement which, since we are all assassins and war criminals, is out of the question because then the Africans would find out about my obscene phone calls and Julie Nixon would be compromised. An appeal to heaven, as they said when King George decided to tax trees.

Another thing is that most of the very annoying people I meet are simply victims of mind control, according to the idea I got from listening to Shelly last night. No wonder I'm such a failure! For nine years I've been exhorting a bunch of androids to rise up and get rid of their oppressors. Page 23 of the paperback edition of Brave New World .

What is the meaning of an Anarchist Manchurian Candidate trying to organize Fascist Robots? Is it entertaining? Is it amusing? What is the purpose? As one non-Caucasian child dies of starvation every two seconds, here in the heart of the Empire collections of machines hold pointless discussions. You figure it out.

Lifestyle: yesterday I bought a new corn cob pipe for a dollar. It gives me a common touch, which I previously sorely lacked.

The thing about ignoring the advice of the Conspiracy is that my decision conforms to the scientific method. The more I heed their advice, the worse things get, war in Cambodia (I was also heeding them in 1978 and '79), living under bridges and out of Krispy Kreme dumpsters, etc. When I ignore their signals I am more relaxed and also things go better.

I, Kerry Thornley, being of sound mind, will all my notebooks, in the event of my death, to a Zenarchist organization to be established in my memory, called the Kerry Thornley Coffee Klatch.

Coffee remains the finest drug in the world in my opinion. In this I'm in hereditary agreement with my paternal grandmother in her lengthy Jack Mormon phase. I did some good acid this weekend. Better than anything I've dropped in years. Could've been, I guess, a 1,000 mic. tab. Strong, lympid stuff. Allen, Shelly and Michael also. We went to an eviction party. I went back to the pub and explained to Yippies why I think Prussians are the problem with Russia, and everybody else, practically. Then I went on strike against thinking about politics. The party looked like it was going to be boring. They wanted to discuss Tony Jackson and CBS and Fire and Puritanism, defensively I wasn't in the mood. They shouldn'ta given me LSD-25 if they wanted me to think about government. So I sat in the pub and watched Allen and Shelly and a gnomic teenager and a laughing Nigerian exchange student look beautifully esthetic, if that isn't redundant. Yesterday when I woke up I not only was still mildly tripping, I also had a hangover from free beers Nat and Shelly and Allen bought me. Very unusual. I took an Excedrin, smoked a roach, then a joint, and the rest of the day was even more unusually nirvanic. It rained and that was nice and psychedelic of the Weather Conspiracy, because this morning it has added to the pleasant acidy illusion that the world had just been to a car wash.

I keep thinking, whenever I think about Woody Guthrie, about how "KILL FASCISTS" was emblazoned on his guitar. How times change.

What rock singer of the Sixties would've written KILL anything on an instrument. That, I guess, was the function of the rock group, The Who. There was hypocrisy going down.

More and more I feel like I should tremble as I write and speak. I make the most casual jokes and the whole world seems to go into upheaval. Of course worrying about it also seems ridiculous.