Turning Over New Leaves of Grass

by Kerry Wendell Thornley

Originally published in Factsheet Five № 25 (pp. 53-54), February 1988. Errors in spelling and grammar are presented as they appear in the original publication.

Nelson (if he is still alive, as I suspect) says these honest probes of the murders of politicians interfere with his personal privacy. For that reason, when I was living with _____ (called "Rockytop Tennessee") I was subjected to the most sadistic humiliation imaginable in bed — because Nelson, I guess, wanted revenge (although Wilson, the Thortons and Ross were all also blamed).

"May the fleas of a thousand camels find your tent" was the inscription on a T-shirt of a guy in Arizona.

Yesterday, in reference to a discussion of Rockefeller.

Who started this Bolshevik bullshit to begin with, Nelson? Is it supposed to be my fault if you wind up in Siberia? A movement to enforce the Bill of Rights, although it would have been a charity, would've secured for all of us sanctity of our homes. Besides, what about MY privacy? Tough shit, I say, Nelson. Tough shit.

Don't think I'm any longer under the illusion that anyone else in the ruling class is any more magnanimous. You are ALL schmucks. So are your Russian henchman who probably betrayed you for the Germans you conspired with to create them to begin with.

Some guy in the train station said today, looking at me: "He wants to take on every battalion in here."

I never expected to win.

My purpose in getting involved was to make it clear I'm not a C.I.A. agent — so the people at The Bird would like me, and so that my son would not be ashamed of me if history wound up pegging me as an imperialist — or rather, so it wouldn't. I was always willing to settle for a chapter in an anthology that included me with Goldman, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Stirner, Berkman, Malatesta, Rocker, et al.

I didn't want all THIS mess either. Your agent — Jim Garrison — was the one who called me a C.I.A. agent. Without him, I never would have thought about finding out who killed a liberal president, for Chrissakes. To me it was just another gangland murder. One mob of politicians hit somebody in a rival mob.

Somewhere there is a "Brown station wagon" with a "7515" misunderstanding on their part only. That would probably be CBS.

Today's "sheriff" is allegedly at "41 84 55".

Is bombarding me with "41=61" "buses".

Involving as many people as possible and getting rid of as much secrecy as possible is the only strategy I think will work. I've already been through nine years of crap. I can endure however, much additonal crap that strategy takes.

SURROUND THE HONKIES!

People I vote to abort before birth, if anyone ever invents a time machine: Ignatius Loyola, Hartin Luther, Carl Guatav Jung.

Jung, because it was his ideas that convinced O.S.S. types like Dulles that Naziism could be reformed, instead of having to be eradicated. Also because of his notions about symbols, responsible for all this vague, bizarre communication that goes on these days. I rue the day I ever complained about the limits of linear communication.

At least, in a linear essay, you can always say: see illustration. And it is at least precise. Condusting life-and-death struggles with only ink blots as forms of communication seems to me irresponsible.

The Tibetan School of Buddhist Embroidery: they talk enlightenment to death the same way Bookhead Buddhists talk sex to death.

That is always one way to murder something, of course. Spend 23 hours a day verbalizing about one hour of fucking a day. Take something that makes life worth living — like screwing or sex — and make an enormously, absurdly complicated problem out of it. The Tibetans killed Buddhism that way snd the Satanists are employing the same strategy to kill sex.

From an agenda discussion: "Well, shall it be first spermicide and then genocide that ve discuss, gentlemen, or shall it be the opposite order?"

It begins with Bob Dylan's line: "1 may look like Robert Frost, but I feel like Jesse lames." It goes on, and on, and on, and so forth — because next I wrote porn as Thomas Howard, so as not to piss my feminist friends off unnecessarily. I felt like Jesse James, though I may have looked like Robert Frost. I was getting $70 and $60 apiece — writing and jacking off at the same time, again. Then it got heavier, etc.

So anyway, it is Thursday night in The Pub. I sit breathless, having worked and hiked some distance to get here. Errands, etc. I drink my coffee in fret that they will frame some Communist for another crime. I read about Lyndon Johnson — torn between two lovers: The Great Society and the Viet Nam War.

Ah, the sensitivity of politics.

Then I try to sit here and feel like anything else besides what I am — a contributor to earthquakes, no better than a politician or statesperson.

The paradox of the philosopher-king dilemma is that if you try to think of yourself as a poet, you might make it worse.

(Roger Lovin asked me if I sucked cocks and wrote poetry. I told him I didn't write much poetry, I wasn't thinking about that at the time — but it makes an appropriate illustration of my feelings at this time.)

I'm an anarchist and a sex pervert. I don't write much poetry. Who, though, are the war criminals?

(Don't try to tell me all the rest of them are anarchists and sex perverts.)

(Because if they were, then anarchism and sex perversion would be as indulged as war crimes are.)

Eris appeared to my Third Eye today and told me the Illuminati is a Whig Conspiracy.

Once a Sufi juggler looked into R.A.W.'s eyes in Berkeley and said something like, though not exactly like: "You will find out much."

Me, I just passed an evangelist in the Market Street civic center plaza area who was yelling: "There's no TIME to repent!"

I'm still trying to figure that one out. Somebody said he was an "Earth Felt African Illuminasus." That could've been Dianne Feinstein, though. (Bob Black could probably figure it out.)

Life is full of equally nagging tid-bits: "Box Car Slim and the Velvet Ass Kid headed west on their honeymoon." Contraband prune pits, I think of them as.

As in: "Now you don't know whether that policeman really did tear apart my car looking for a contraband prune pit or not, do you?" — Michael Stanley

The riddle of epistemology.

There's a band here tonight. Beefheart Street, I think it is called.

John Horgan sent me two postcards today. That's his name. John Horgan. He sends me postcards. Today. Two of them. (I'll try to remember to glue them to the back of this notebook.)

One is a "Bob" manifestation, so certified by me, Jesse Sump, in my capacity as Calif., etc. The other is of three figures — a large central one decimated. Something about you are going to be sorry if you kill Greyface and sorry if you don't, I guess.

Brings up the value of an objective standard of subjective evaluation — in terms of "large" and "small". "He said his name was Columbus and I just said Good Luck." — Dylan

As a Taoist I've never even been able to find a subjective standard of subjectlve evaluation. Omar Khayyam sdd something about willy-nilly wanderIng.

I could scam you and say I was being scientiflc. First you'd have to supply me with facts so I could prove it, though.

A book I'll probably never write: A sci-fi plot about space fish — enormous creatures that come swimming out of the holes in space and bite holes in tall fins of rockets.

Like Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent — only with Captain Corbitt overtones.

THE CREATURES FROM THE BLACK HOLE IN SPACE.

The bigger ones swallow moons.

One swims to earth one day and begins nibbling at the stratosphere. The Angel Aerosol.

An anglefish, I guess.

A sequel I'll probably never write could be called THE DOLPHIN THAT NEARLY ATE THE WORLD.

"You folks maybe don't understand about how we do things here in Pittsburgh," said the Mayor.

History has but few interstices. I have called you together in this loophole today...

Bod Hipler found a hundred year old encyclopedia of religions that listed the Catholic Church and the Society of Jesus as separate faiths. (Make of it what you will.)

"Summer solstice to you, Infidel." — Hassan-i-Sabbah X

It sounds like Finnegan's Wake in here tonight. I always think of — who was it, Corso? — that wanted to throw Kerouac's CORPUS out on the floor at the latter's funeral — as a Zen gesture. I hope you fuck on my grave — literally — my friends. There's a book called CLOSING TIME I think me and Jimmy Carter both liked a lot.

(Ending as allusive as he began)

"It ain't easy being a goat's foot," quipped the midget.

Fred's Epistle to the Dallas Criminal Court Building.