We ain’t nothin' but a couple a good ole boys havin’ some yucks – ain’t that right?

Haw, haw, haw!

Just kidding.

But you know, if you’d read the thing I linked above, which itself links to some other writings immediately preceding it, all of which taken together provides the proper context for what will follow, you’d save me some time and yourself some trouble.

That’s a li’l bit of meta-programming for you, or me, though that’s not what I had in mind when I chose that title for this.

I was thinking of John Lilly, actually – this fine fella, who’s clearly no more mentally unstable than our fine, cabin-feverish friends Homer and Monty –

Sing it with me, everyone – you know the words!

Born with a silver spoon between his teeth,

Raised in the woods so’s he knew every tree,

Melted his brains with some LSD,

Emblem of freedom in the land of the free.

Day-veyyyy, Daaay-vey Crockett! King of the Wild Fron-tee-eeer!

Oh God, he is the American Dream,

With a spindle up his butt till it makes him scream,

He’ll do anything to get ahead;

And his name is Bo-bby Brow-how-hown --

Watch him, now! He’s goin’ down.

Just kidding.

John Lilly, you say?

Who’s he, you might ask?

Oh, him?

You mean the “scientist” who regularly mega-dosed himself with mind-melting LSD, anesthetizing, dissociating horse-tranquilizers, and other consciousness-perturbing pharmaceuticals before immersing himself in dis-embodying sensory-deprivation-tanks of his invention to commune with bodiless astral intelligences that gave him occult knowledge?

Oh, you mean li’l Timmy Leary and tricky Dicky “Ram Dass” Alpert’s friend?

You know Tim and Dick, don’t you, those fellow travelers on them same astral planes as Jolly Johnny loved so well?

I’m talkin’ about these fine fellers, also clearly not mentally unwell at the end of their stints and stunts on the world stage (and behind its scenes):

"Is that you, John Wayne?"

"Is this me?"

John C. Lilly, you say?

That guy who was right there in the mix with Leary, Alpert, and all the other CIA-MK-ULTRA-Macy-Conference-Esalen-Institute-New-Age-Cultural-Subversion-and-Dissolution agent-creeps, those slimy, larval beings under the floorboards preaching to you that to do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law?

Videlicet, if it liketh thee:

An American Sentence.

Some Questions.

That’s just an indirect indication of something with much fuller implications; but we’re on a slightly different trail today, so – onward, turning neither left nor right.

John C. Lilly?

Oh, you mean the guy who wrote Programming and Meta-Programming the Human Bio-Computer, the abuser’s manual to the human body-mind and how to manipulate it into perceiving, believing, and ultimately doing whatever its programmers want it to do?

Yeah, that’s the one.

Real piece of work, that guy.

Real piece of work, what him and his seething, wriggling colony-complex of blindly devouring larval cohorts and kin – fellow maggot-folk of Mordor – have helped birth into being – the modern world we live in, in a word.

And you know, TV’s a part of that, and film, and popular music, and all its faces and front-men.

I mean, really a part of that, right there in the mix, whether you want to talk about intelligence agencies, or occultism, or scientific research into precise ways to alter and manipulate the human body-mind.

Again – that’s just an indirect indication of something with much fuller implications, but we’re on a slightly different trail today, so – onward, turning neither left nor right.

Why am I telling you all this?

If you dutifully followed the links I shared above, you’d know I went a-panning in a rich stream of memory and came back well-laden with gold, and that I’ve taken a bit of a detour and a breather, speaking of the sequencing of nuggets in space and time for your inspection and enjoyment, to share a couple other things that came to mind the last few days.

Anyway, after this I’ll be done and will return to what I first intended. I think.

But as these sorts of things usually work out – speaking of inspiration and creation, in the artistic and organic sense, – things unfold and unfurl in unforeseen ways; and what I’ve learned is that the really successful prospectors and gold-panners go with the flow, and their gut, and where it leads them.

Amid all this gold-panning and coming to mind of other reflections put into writing, I got an email from a friend – one I haven’t seen in many years and who I only hear from once every few months or so.

I won’t say his name, and I won’t be too specific in describing him, out of love for him and respect for his privacy; what I want to share here, as I said here, I share not so much to chronicle personal details for their own sake, but to point to something more universal, by way of the personal.

Maybe you’d be surprised I know someone like this. I certainly think it’s strange that not only should our paths have crossed, but that we should have become friends – and that, it seems, he even respects me.

We really are from different worlds.

And why does he respect me?

I’ve never asked him, but of a truth, I perceive that it is because I am no respecter of persons.

I’ve never pried into it, but…

I believe he comes from a “wealthy line,” and certainly lives in something like splendor.

He went to an Ivy League school, graduating with top honors, and throughout his long, storied, and various career producing writing, television programming, film, and many well-received and widely-distributed public artistic and creative works, has rubbed elbows, hob-nobbed, and worked with people in music, film, and politics whose names you’d know well – I mean, right up to the highest levels.

After I first met him and after we got to know each other a little, he’d start to drop little stories about these things, and as he saw that… well, my eyes didn’t widen or light up, I didn’t start slavering and rubbing my hands, and I didn’t start pestering him with requests or even follow-up questions… I think that was a relief and a breath of fresh air to him; and that, and our ability to connect and converse on a mutually satisfactory level of discourse, led to something like a friendship.

How did we meet?

Maybe this would surprise you, too – and it surprised, or perplexed, me for a while, till I got to know him better – but it was at a bookstore.

An old, dusty, musty, shabby used bookstore where he was the manager, and I was hired as a bookseller.

The funny thing is, though at that time he certainly still hob-nobbed in the highest echelons and produced the kind of content I mentioned earlier, his work in that respect was mainly “project-based,” while his role was as a high-level producer-executive type; so, what I mean is that he could more or less make his own schedule.

And what did he do in his spare time?

Put in well over 40 hours a week, always wearing the same plain and modest clothes, sweating while hauling and shuffling around boxes of dusty, crusty old books, tidying various messes up, chatting up and selling books to the commonest of common folk, whether little children or hoary elders, and investing all of his immense ability into being of service to the employees and the business there, “above and beyond the call of duty,” even.

More than once, in that milieu, I saw him do silent works of compassionate charity for people in real need – and in such a subtle way that it moved me deeply.

Why am I saying this?

Well, I’d put it this way.

Knowing what I know, which I’ve alluded to here and elsewhere, it’s an astounding thing to see a person of his provenance doing that sort of work in that sort of spirit.

I wouldn’t think it was possible if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.

Why am I saying this?

Because, after our time working together at that bookstore – really, a beautiful time in both our lives, which he’ll occasionally allude to in emails – he, being a person who can never not be doing something, found himself writing for a certain publication, and producing certain promotional video content.

To bring us to the point more quickly, though it might have been better to wend our way there more slowly and windingly, smelling many flowers along that way – over the last few years, I’ve noticed a few things about that content he was creating and which he’d share with me.

There seemed to be two categories of it.

One, something more along the lines of personal reminiscence, written with love, with heart, often centered on books and bookstores, literature, music, and musicians.

And two, something I would call… programming.

I mean, I’m talking something right out of the John C. Lilly and Co. Larval-Folk Playbook – political agit-prop, a sheep-devouring wizard’s hypnotic double-speak, something designed to dazzle, confuse, misinform, and ultimately program and degrade those who consumed it.

Some real evilous shit, if you’ll pardon my proverbial French.

And what I’d also noticed, amid all this, when I had occasion to see my friend on screen in the video content he’d make, was that… he looked like he’d been drained of color, of life, and of hope.

Not the person I remembered from the bookstore days. No, sir.

Behind the smile and the polished speech, I heard, saw, and felt… regret, sorrow, self-loathing, and disgust with what he was involved with.

As the Good Master said, rightly and in truth:

“No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”

There are physical consequences to spiritual principles; real spirituality is incarnational, in more ways than one.

Listen.

I won’t go into it more than I have already, but over the years, now and then, indirectly by way of pointed prose and sudden poetic jabs, I’ve tried to point all this out to him, and point him back to a more wholesome way of being – as far as I can tell, to no avail.

One flower’s fragrance for you, before I get to what I wanted to share today.

Many times, at that shabby old bookstore, my friend and I – the two real heavyweights of the establishment, holdin’ it down on the regular – would be on a closing shift together on a Sunday.

Usually by late afternoon, a couple hours or so before closing, the place would be a ghost town, and so my friend, being the savvy manager he was with an impeccable savoir-faire, would say, and I paraphrase, “Ok, Jian. Enough work. Let’s sit outside and enjoy the evening.”

So, we’d drag out some shabby old chairs or stools to the sidewalk, sit outside for an hour, and enjoy the waning day – the birds singing, sun shining (or setting), wind blowing.

And we’d talk, joke, laugh, listen to the music (after-hours selection of his impeccable choosing) coming out from inside the building, or just enjoy a little silence for a few moments.

When I said he’d allude to our beautiful time together at the bookstore sometimes, it was always to these moments: “I miss those Sundays.”

I told you, I am not a respecter of persons, and he respected that.

Well, I’ll wind this all down for you this way, and I won’t sweeten the sorrow of the reminiscence, either; in this life, after all, a little bitterness, sourness, and other unsweet flavors are salutary.

This weekend, this friend of mine shared his latest writing – about whatever it is that’s supposed to be going on in the world, and in American politics, right now. I don’t pay so much attention to all that anymore.

From what I’ve come to see and understand, it’s all lies, all illusion.

It made me sad, taking in mind all I’ve shared or implied above, to see that sort of thing coming from my friend’s hand, and so I wrote him what I’ll share below.

I said elsewhere – Small Flowering, Vast Pleasance, most notably – that my love is like fungus in an old forest, in part because people don’t know what they’re looking at half the time, while if they entertain taking it, they can’t shake the uneasy feeling that it will make them sweat or vomit, or even bring them to the brink of oblivion.

Yeah.

More’s the pity.

9 June 2025

Hey, XXXX!

Thank you — excellent writing, as always, though you don't need me to tell you. I enjoy reading things written by someone with a sense of esthetics and a heart, such as your esteemed self.

Only, as a friend, I'd like to ask, as I've often thought to ask — do you believe these things you write? Not so much the reminiscences and reflections, but... the other stuff.

No need to tell me; I don't ask for myself.

I reflect just now on a line, here translated from Farsi, that a famous poet, Hushang Ebtehaj, spoke in an amazing performance with my favorite musician --

"I who sit in this corner, outside of the world..."

This performance, actually — good even if you don't understand the words, since the feeling in the playing and recitation tells the tale just as well:

Ebtehaj and Lotfi – Bal dar Bal

The words, such as I understand them, are of the poet speaking to a tree known for its blood-red blossoms — reflecting on the similarities between them, poet and tree, as he sits apart from the world, the walls of his mind and its dark memories close around him, with no sky, no spring in sight — only the bed of dead blood-red blossoms around his feet.

Anyway, I'm not saying that's how I feel, but that line does come to mind as I say that, from where I sit, here in my inner and outer semi-monastic cell, when I read writing like what you've shared today, I'm mystified.

I feel sometimes, wading into this news sewage-stream or that, like I'm plopped into a diarrhea-rama of cardboard cutouts, paper dolls wobbling comically in pseudo-human gesticulation along pre-cut ruts as they're drawn for dazzling drama's sake by an impresario's coarse and cynical hand.

You know?

Actors all, and poor ones at that, selling a cheap illusion for the price of the soul.

It's interesting that, from one ancient perspective, drama was sacred, while from another ancient perspective, actors were treated with a universal revulsion and caution.

I think you reconcile those views by realizing that drama has an immeasurable power to teach and transform the mind and soul in a way the conscious mind can't apprehend, and that because of that it's ever-ripe for an abuse with the worst kinds of ramifications on both the personal and societal scales.

Kind of like music, actually, which was always a sacred art and tool of soul-instruction, too.

But I mean, Trump, an actor. Gates, an actor. And, joke on top of jokes, execrable-actor-Gates claims execrable-actor-Trump's actions are worse than his own:

“The world’s richest man has been involved in the deaths of the world’s poorest children.”

Talk about projection.

I don't know, even if you take these things at face value, it's absurd.

The Gates-Sanger connection should make him blush with shame when he says that sort of thing, recalling the "Negro Project" and his family's connection to that, just as the voices of Kenyans should -- maybe some of the world's poorest, -- which have said to the world that Gates-vaccines have sterilized their women, bringing uncounted deaths to children by way of precluding their birth.

You look it up now, and you get "fact-checked" into oblivion, spun into a hypnotic trance of existential and epistemological doubt — it's all one global spin-room now, which I'm surprised hasn't made more people vomit yet — but I've spent a lifetime cultivating a tongue for the savor of truth through walking an endless gauntlet of unscrupulous vendors shoving ladlefuls of lie-laced slop in my face, and I know truth, and untruth, when I meet it.

In a sense, I'm privileged to lead the life I live, small as it seems from the outside — here in this corner, outside of the world.

But... I won't apologize for the inexplicable good fortune, in that sense, I've been blessed to receive. Now I've set roots down in something living and real, and — well — I should shudder to doubt the wisdom of the mind that set me here or to question the nature of its blessings.

All I do is let my roots grow deeper and my canopy higher, with the hope of bearing ever more good fruit. Where the seeds of that might be borne, I needn't think about; the fruits of my fruit are not my charge or concern.

Your friend, seated eternally in a placeless sacred Sunday, watching the sun set, with shabby books behind me, shimmering leaves before me, and an empty seat beside me,

Jian