Posts in Chronological Order

David’s second operation, to go in and fix the tube, which had stopped draining fluid, was May 21st, and there was all of it do again: the hospital sounds, the hospital smells, the hospital waiting-room furniture, the strain of waiting, the bad jokes, the silences, This time we brought our schoolbooks, for it was the…

Our lives read like straightforward narratives, but they live more like braiding. This happens, and then that happens, and then the other happens, seemingly without follow-up, and then something else happens that incorporates them; depends upon them; makes sense of them. We look back and say, “Well sure, it’s obvious.” But it isn’t obvious until…

Dave Schlachter died in his hometown at about 11:20 a.m. on March 2, 1970. (A phone call saying that David was back in the hospital expected to die that night. A hastily arranged thousand-mile drive that brought three of us to be with him. A couple of days while he hung on. And then, he…

One night late in February 1970, very shortly before I got a call from Dave’s father saying Dave was dying, I was in a drugstore checkout line when a strong impulse led me to pick up a paperback book off the rack. (Oddly, for some reason the thought came to me that I might steal…

In 1970, I was living my life exclusively Downstairs. I believed in “supernatural” powers, or wanted to, but I had no access, and no way of gaining access. (Besides—though I didn’t realize it then—my idea of supernatural powers was closer to Superman comics than to the real thing.) I had no guide, no idea where…

I have come to realize, nobody can possibly tell the true story of his life. How do you put a quart of material into a pint of words? It can’t be done. Life comes at us all at once, and all the time. When we come to try to describe it, we have to look…

(Non)-ordinary life From May, 1970 (the mescaline experience that woke me up to new possibilities), to January, 1987 (the Shirley MacLaine workshop that did the same thing in a very different way) was almost 17 years. Ordinary years? Ordinary life? Yes and no. The externals were much the same as anybody else’s. The internals were…

This past week, I got involved in one of those projects that keeps your surface mind occupied but gives you time to remember, and daydream, and ponder. Really, it worked like a time machine. I had all these clippings that had sat in my file cabinet, literally for decades. Editorials, columns, book reviews, that I…

[An early version of Muddy Tracks was going to be titled Living in Monroe’s New World.  That will never be written, now, so I might as well post it here.] In the course of writing Muddy Tracks, I re-read Bob Monroe’s three books all at the same time, reading each one from front to back,…