Chop and Slash

Got an email from a writer I know, not a martial artist, who said, "Yeah, okay, I can understand how you might want to know some hand to hand fighting. Maybe even how to use a pocketknife. But why would you want to spend any kind of time learning to fight with swords, as you mentioned? "

How often, he went on, is it likely you'll get into a sword duel with anybody?

Probably less often than I'll be struck by lightning. Or win the lottery. Dodge a falling meteorite ...

It is true. Not a lot of folks pack swords around these days. I do have one leaning by the door of my office. Were somebody to kick in the front door right now ... nah, probably I'd just use the gun.

And there's a big ole machete out in the garage I use to clear blackberry bushes by the back fence. Though I'd have to wonder at the sanity of anybody who'd attack me while I'm clearing brush with that two-foot-long machete in hand.

This why-do-it? question comes from somebody whose primary hobby is golf. And while I have nothing against folks who want to hammer a defenseless little white ball hither and yon over a well-trimmed, giant lawn, attempting to land the sucker in a series of holes, that's not me.

Chances are I won't ever need a sword to defend myself. But if that once-in-a-lifetime event should occur, better to have the skill than not. And in the meantime, it's fun to play, and, more importantly, it helps in the understanding of the root movements. Waving a sword around, cutting, stabbing, or blocking, comes from the same actions that you use if you don't have a sword. To do the bladework right, you have to have the basic moves right.

The ability to pick up something longer than it is wide and use it for self-defense -- book-fu, anyone? -- is just another skill notch on the old smoke-wagon's grips ...

Almost a Six Pack ...

Turn Off the Light

You know how you can be out walking at night and you pass a streetlight that suddenly blinks off? Sometimes, it's burned out; sometimes, it's overheated, and a sensor shuts it down, circuit-breaker, like that.

If it happens that a light blinks off when you pass by, it kind of makes you wonder.
Something about your energy?

Coincidence explains it, of course, but sometimes that seems to get stretched a bit.

Tonight, whilst walking the dogs for a short loop, only three or four blocks, the light-blinking-off thing happened.

Not once. Not twice.

Five times.

On the street, in the drugstore parking lot, in the pocket park.

I can't recall that ever happening that many times before.

It's the eve of my birthday. I wonder if it means something ...

A Real Man's Gun

Somebody got around to posting this one. Just watch ...

Speaking of Guitar Music

According to a survey done by Acoustic Guitar Magazine, hereunder the top twenty-five pieces guitarists play (or want to learn how to play) in the USA. At one time or another, I could manage about ten of them.

Acoustic Guitar’s Top 25 Songs

1. “Blackbird” The Beatles
2. “Tears in Heaven” Eric Clapton
3. “Aerial Boundaries” Michael Hedges
4. “Layla” Eric Clapton
5. “Classical Gas” Mason Williams
6. “Fire and Rain” James Taylor
7. “Here Comes the Sun” The Beatles
8. “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” Bob Dylan
9. “Embryonic Journey” Jorma Kaukonen
10. “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” Richard Thompson
11. “Daughters” John Mayer
12. “County Down” Phil Keaggy
13. “Little Martha” The Allman Brothers
14. “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” Crosby, Stills, and Nash
15. “The Boxer” Simon and Garfunkel
16. “Windy and Warm” Chet Atkins
17. “Crash” Dave Matthews
18. “When Will I” Monte Montgomery
19. “Candy Man” Reverend Gary Davis
20. “Stairway to Heaven” Led Zeppelin
21. “Tangled Up in Blue” Bob Dylan
22. “Wish You Were Here” Pink Floyd
23. “Black Mountain Rag” Doc Watson
24. “Harvest Moon” Neil Young
25. “Hotel California” The Eagles

Don't Play it Again Sam

When guitar players go into music stores, they tend to want to pick up the axes and play a few riffs. The more popular a song is, the more likely it is that -- if you are a clerk in a guitar store -- you will quickly get real sick of hearing it, because every Clapton wanna-be who comes in will sure as hell play it.

Recall the sign on the guitar store wall in Wayne's World -- No Stairway to Heaven ... ?

Now it's all Green Day and Prince, but back in my day, it was Deep Purple and Led Zepplin and Beatles, and for the acoustic guys, Mason Williams.

I thought it would be fun to put together a little parody of this, so I came up with something called "Guitar Clerk's Bane, 1969. These are some of the Oh-crap-not-again! pieces the guys behind the counter at Music City were hearing in the late sixties ...

And, of Course, There's This ...

Stairway to Gilligan ...

Blasphemy

This is burn-'em-at-the-stake wrong, but for a fan of either the Beatles or Led Zep, entirely too funny.

Bad Moon Risin'

So, early this morning, there was a total eclipse of the moon visible in our part of the world.

I confess I did not stay up to watch it all, though I did set my mental alarm to rouse me around totality, went out and had a look.

Conditions were perfect here -- clear skies, and at three a.m., the city glow was as dim as it gets locally.

Very impressive, it was, a creepy orange.

Must have terrified primitive societies, this kind of celestial event, until they realized it was a regular phenomenon.

I always wondered -- does a werewolf revert to human form during a full eclipse? Might be an interesting story there, if somebody hasn't already written it ...

How, uh, Old Are You ... ?

I found this amusing:

Your real age.

The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Fear Itself

The title is from Franklin D. Roosevelt's first inaugural speech, in 1933. It a great quote -- but it doesn't really mean anything. The speech itself is wonderful, however, go read it.

Over on Dan Moran's blog, there is a thread on the foolishness of martial arts that is also worth reading. It sparked some thoughts about fear and how to deal with it. I started there, and decided to offer a couple more ideas here.

(To martial artists: Don't read Dan's posting with a knee-jerk reaction to the word "foolishness," that's not the point he's making.)

Um. Anyway, back to fear.

People have different ways of reacting when fear peeps through their widow late at night. Some pull the covers over their heads. Some get up and reach for the phone. Some go to the window. How I learned to handle many of my basic hair-raisers and stomach-clutchers was a process sometimes referred to as Napoleonic Compensation -- because he was a short and slight fellow, ole Boney conquered most of his world to make up for it ...

One can run. One can hide. One can go forth to meet it -- head-on, or at an angle.

When faced with something for which I felt some level of real worry, shading sometimes into full-blown terror, my personal process evolved. First, I learned as much about the subject as I could intellectually. Then I looked for some study that would allow me to master, or at least fight to a draw, with my fear. This wasn't consciously, until much later in life. It was just what I did.

I was terrified of the water as a child. My father's method of teaching us how to swim was to show us the strokes in shallow water, and then toss us into the deep end. At eight, I managed to thrash my way to the side. My little brother, six, sank like a brick, and my father had to dive in and fish him out. So, yes, I could swim, after a fashion, but I was afraid that I would drown. Somebody pushed my head under during Marco Polo, I panicked.

So I took all the Boy Scout lifesaving classes, the junior, the senior. I took the Water Safety Instructor course from the Red Cross, and I got a job as a lifeguard where I spent several summers around and in the water. I taught swimming classes, swam a mile a day, and the summer I was seventeen, could hold my breath underwater for four minutes. I turned myself into a porpoise, got so comfortable in the water that one day, I looked up and there was absolutely no more fear connected to it. I might drown, but I was as waterproof as I could be. I loved the pool. D0n't swim much now, but I still love it.

Same deal with getting beaten up. I didn't really get thumped much as a little boy, but I was a scrawny, smallish kid until well into high school, and I worried about being bullied. I was afraid of it. Truth was, I gave as good as I got, and out of a handful of fights, I won more than I lost. But fear lives in a deep cave, and you have to shine a bright light in there to see well enough to shoo it out.

So, martial arts. Karate. Okinawa-te. Kung fu. Tai chi. Aikido. Kendo. Finally, Silat. I did it for a time before I stopped dying a thousand deaths, and by then, I had found something much more than just being able to defend myself, I had found a Path. Been on it since.

These days, the question is not whether I can defend myself or family against a threat, but how to do it the most efficiently, with the least amount of effort and damage ...

I used to get stage fright pretty good. So I took speech classes, did plays, strummed my guitar in public, and even did stand-up at a couple of science fiction conventions. Steve Barnes and I once did a "Whose Line is it Anyway?" routine at a con, off the cuff, winging it, and if comedy is hard, improv comedy is a tightrope act.

How well did we do? Pretty well, actually, but it doesn't matter. We got up and did it.

The fight isn't under the glove. It's under the hat.

Fear of assorted deadly diseases got me into medicine, where, after nursing school, I taught myself enough to challenge and pass the PA-C exam. I was for some years a PA at a Family Clinic.

I can't cure cancer, but at least I know the ways to fight it, if it should come to call.

Knowledge is truly power. Even a single candle is better than cursing the darkness.

This is not to say that I am particularly brave or adept. Being an autodidact works for me, but it tends to leave gaps in one's education. And not everything is amenable to study and training.

How to overcome the worry that your teenager might die in a traffic accident on Saturday night is a tough one. Lying awake after midnight listening for the front door to open was in my past, and I expect for those of you with children not yet teens, it will be in your future.

The Buddhists have something called The Four Noble Truths. The essence of these are:

1. Life involves suffering.
2. There's a reason for suffering, and the reason is attachment.
3. There is a way to deal with attachment, and you can learn it.
4. The way is the Eightfold Path.

I'm not a Buddhist, but the first three truths resonate fully with me, and I'll stipulate that the fourth has a lot of good material in it. It's not a religion, it's an ethical system, and it does offer answers. I don't accept them all, but a lot of the man I have come to be involved figuring out who I didn't want to be, and how best to avoid that. Living in fear was high on that list of things I didn't want to be.

Sometimes knowing which path you don't want to take is the way to get headed in the direction you do.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

So yesterday Dianne and I went to a gathering at the home of some old friends -- old in the sense that we have known them for twenty-five years and some. And, well, okay, old as in getting up there, too ...

All of the other folks who showed up, we've known that long or almost so. Among them are artists, poets, writers, teachers, a physicist, and people who had long careers in business.
Several of whom are most those things.

It is so relaxing to sit among a group of liberal folk and talk about politics, religion, sex, growing older, telling dirty jokes, whatever comes up, and have a free-wheeling and spirited conversation bound only by our abilities to keep up.

We drank wine, ate good food -- a potluck -- and laughed and got angry at the state of the country, and had a fine, fine, visit. Offhand, casual, and important in ways hard to explain to folks who don't have such a wonderful luxury.

We count it as one of our blessings.

Tell 'Em Groucho Sent You

Channel surfing last night and I came across an old episode of the quiz show You Bet Your Life, starring Groucho Marx. This one was from the mid-fifties, which is the period I remember seeing them, even though the show started on radio before I was born, and stayed on TV into the early sixties.

It was interesting how well it help up. And how much better it was than today's rock-'em-sock-'em neon-and strobe-light fake-excitement quiz shows.

Who wants to be a millionaire? All of us. Who cares about the idiot who gets to take a shot on the tube? Not me.

The old format was simple: Groucho Marx, one of the sharpest and quickest wits ever to grace a stage, sat in a chair behind a small table, smoking a big cigar. His announcer, and very often stooge, George Fenneman would come out with a couple to play the game. Sometimes they were pre-selected before the show, and sometimes they had been put forth from the audience only moments before they stepped on stage.

The game itself consist of several questions, with values from ten to a hundred dollars. The contestants started out with a hundred dollars and added or subtracted to their total by answering correctly or missing it. This was done with three sets of players, and whoever won the most got to come back at the end to try for the big jackpot, a thousand bucks.

There was a secret word, held in the mouth of a duck puppet painted to look like Groucho and if a contestant said it aloud, the duck would drop down and they'd win an extra hundred.

The most a contestant could come away with in the preliminary round was something under four hundred dollars, plus a hundred if they said the "secret woid." Not so much today, but in 1955, the average family income was $3400, so the players could leave with a nice chunk of change even if they didn't hit the jackpot. (The money got bigger in the late fifties when the high-priced game shows like The $64,000 Question arrived.)

The categories were varied, the questions ranged from too-easy to pretty hard, and when Groucho was feeling feisty, he'd steer the conversation so that the contestants would say the secret word.

The show was presented by DeSoto/Plymouth, and the end, Groucho would appear behind a round window in DeSoto sign, tell the viewer to go see their dealer, and tell 'em Groucho sent you, before closing the porthole. The commercials were an integral part of the show, with Fenneman or Groucho or both doing them as they went.

The biggest part of the experience was watching and listening to Groucho, who was in his mid-sixties by then, crack wise. The contestants were seldom polished, they stammered or got embarrassed, and some of them had no stage presence whatsoever. Doctors, lawyers, dance teachers, sailors, housewives -- there was a wide spectrum of players. One I saw last night was a veterinarian who specialized in cats-only. In L.A., in 1955. Looked to be fifty, but was only thirty-two.

People looked a lot older back then.

Another pair were a Marine lieutenant and a young woman who organized elephant-hunting safaris. Neither were married. Groucho had them kissing before he was done ...

Now and then, a contestant would throw out some snappy comebacks, and Groucho loved that. But if you wanted to fence with Groucho, best you bring your sharp blade, cause he might be old, but de mahn, he be a steppin' razor, yah ...

There's a story, mostly likely apocryphal, I always loved: Interviewing one contestant in the radio days, he asked her how many children she had.

Nineteen, she said.

Nineteen? Why so many?"

I like children.

Well, I like my cigar, too, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while.

The story is that NBC quickly cut that before it went out, but that for years, they used the recorded laugh track after the audience heard it on other shows when they wanted to show that something had been really hilarious. Supposedly right up there with Ed Ames's tomahawk throw on the Carson Show years later.

(Those of you who missed that episode of The Tonight Show: Ames played the character "Mingo," on the Fess Parker Daniel Boone show. He learned how to throw a tomahawk, and one night on Carson, set they set up a board with a cowboy chalked on it. He threw, hit the cowboy square on the crotch, and Carson did a take and milked it until the audience was peeing themselves laughing. Some line about not knowing Ames was Jewish did me in. Supposedly the longest laugh in TV history.)

Both Groucho and Fenneman denied the cigar exchange ever happened, and there's no tape of it, but still, you never let truth stand in the way of a good story.

I think Drew Carey is funny, but ... he's not in Groucho's league. Offhand, I can't think of anybody who is ...

Technical Difficulties, Please Stand By ...

So, Blogger put up a new feature, a video button. Supposedly, you can click on it, upload a vid directly from your computer without having to go through YouTube or Google.

Cool. So, I gave it a shot, a guitar practice session featuring Canon in D. Well, what I can do with one guitar on a piece that requires more than one instrument if it is going to be a canon.

Sound came through okay, but the images ran at triple speed, which made for something of an amusing disconnect ...

The Eilandia Chronicles: The Dreadnaught

Been cranking away on this sucker, our fat fantasy, for a while. Coming up this week on four hundred pages in manuscript form. We're shooting for about seven hundred pages total for the first draft. Hoping to get it done this fall.

Book One of the Chronicles, of course ...

Above is a cartoon sketch I did so we (my collaborator Reaves and I) would remember the general layout of the ship. Its not huge, but it's the only steam warship on our made-up planet, and also the only vessel with real guns -- air-powered -- so none of the other countries navies will be sinking her in a sea battle.

Most of our world's technology is late Eighteenth or early Nineteeth Century -- sailing ships, horse-carriages, coal oil lamps, like that. Small magicks exist, but nothing major.

One country, Stahlrogia, has gotten a jump on the rest of the planet, they've got steam-power, trains, DC electricity, and big ambitions ...

Stay tuned. Once we get a draft ready, I'll put up some preview scenes. We think that folks who like Reaves' stuff, or mine -- or both together -- are gonna love this one.

I'm Ready for My Long Shot, Mr. DeMille ...

So, the world premiere of the Star Trek New Voyages episode, "World Enough, and Time," was yesterday in L.A. I haven't heard how the theatrical event went, but the concomitant streaming video of the actual showing apparently did not come to pass -- a software problem.

In any event, the episode should be available for viewing at the New Voyages site, although it is apt to be busy for a time as fans log on to watch it. If you are a Trek fan, you should find it interesting.

(NOTE: Apparently there is a problem here -- the old site keeps coming up 404, and I don't know if that's because it's overwhelmed with hits or they scuttled it. So maybe you won't get to see this after all ...)

My five seconds of fame as the V.O. of the Shuttle Pilot has arrived but you can't hear it ...

If they do the remake of 2001: A Space Odyssey, I'm going to audition for the voice of the HAL Nine Thousand ...

"I'm sorry, Dave, but you don't get foreign residuals for this role ..."

Cover Art

So, I was digging around for the article I wrote on the SCA -- couldn't find it, I expect it is in the garage, I'll go check later. But I did come across the acme of my career as an artist -- such that it was: The cover of the University of Montana's 'zine, being edited at the time by buddy and sometime collaborator, George Guthridge.

Behold, the Michaelangelo of Port Townsend in all his artistic glory ...

Time Passes By, Things Change, Worlds Move

Carolyn and Jim
Around Christmas, 1972

So I had dinner last night with Jim. Thirty-some-odd years we haven't seen each other, and since I knew it was him, I could see the young man in the older one, but had I passed him on the street in other circumstances, I'd not have recognized him. The beard is gone, the glasses thinner, his hair, like mine, is shorter and gray. He's put on a few pounds, but he still had his sense of humor.

Like Paul Simon said in Still Crazy After All These Years, "we talked about some old times and we had ourselves some beer ..."

Both of us have lost track of most of the people we had in common, but we passed what we knew back and forth:

Kid Ford left for Alabama. Took my .22 rifle with him.

Michael and Connie split after their daughter, Shanti, was born. (After their big hippie wedding on the levee the summer we lived on the farm, Connie spent their honeymoon night in a tent sleeping not with Michael, but with John, who had planted some primo marijuana plants down the levee on the edge of some woods.)

Uncle Jay finished restoring the 40-foot sailboat in the backyard, had it towed to the river, and sailed it down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, then all the way to Miami, keeping land in sight and to his port side all the way. He sold the boat, conned his way into a computer job with Boeing in Marietta, quit, went back to school, and eventually become a medical doctor in Oklahoma.

Nobody knew what happened to his first wife, Cheryl.

My sister-in-law Judy passed away from breast cancer a dozen years ago.

BB runs a medical caseworking company in Baton Rouge, married to Jackie, the girl whose parents were deeply into Silva Mind Control.

Jan moved to Florida and went to work as a shrimper. She died in the eighties.

Little Mike is an EMT in Atlanta and a blues singer.

Meg moved to Denver and is a school psychologist at a local college.

Jim has been married thrice, and Carolyn? Last time he saw her was sometime in the eighties. Ran into her in the library, of all places. No idea where she is now.

Digging through the old pictures, I couldn't find any we took while on the farm. We didn't own a camera then, and some of the faces on pictures other people must have taken, I can't remember at all. What was the lawyer's name, who got the bust on BB and Jan's thrown out? Chip Duchein? Yes, Charles Duchein III -- he'd been an attorney in the military, kick-ass-take-names, and he walked into court and bam! blew the prosecutor out of the water.

Chip did yoga. Had a house in ... Zachary? Baker? He later got into hang-gliding. Eventually, he had his office in a converted house on Napoleon Street -- the same house Dianne and I lived in right after we got married ...

Nobody from B.R. ever made it up to live on the property in Arkansas. We realized that wasn't going to happen. Nobody was putting any green energy into it except Dianne and me, and it didn't take a weatherman to see how that wind was gonna blow. After Jim and I drove up there and scoped out the place, I came home absolutely certain it wasn't going to fly, and we pulled out before it crashed. Cost us some good will amongst the families, but that's what we had to do.

I remember swimming naked in the Arkansas pond with the other hippies who came to visit; I remember having to unroll my sleeping bag on the hard ground. And being waked up in the middle of the night to move my old Volvo, which was blocking somebody in. Eating from a pot of stew that had been simmering, with stuff added to it every so often, for more than six months. The good old country boy who lived in the cabin with the stew, it turned out, had a Ph.D in English from Harvard ...

Jim went off to New Orleans, then Tennessee, eventually to Denver. Had two boys, has two granddaughters, enjoys his work in the engineering department of the big construction company for which he works. Has done a lot of research and backgrounding on the book he hasn't got around to writing yet. Back in the day, we exchanged a couple of short stories, but it was before I got serious about writing fiction.

The first piece of writing for which I was ever paid was due to Jim. He was a member of the SCA -- the folks who get dressed up as knights and ladies and lords and all. One Sunday morning, he invited me to go along. I took my camera, shot some pictures before they ran me off for not being in costume, and went home and wrote a short piece for the local paper. The article and a few of the pictures showed up in the Sunday Morning Advocate a few weeks later, and I earned fifty bucks for it. I had turned pro.

The SCA folks playing at sword-and-shield at the time didn't impress me. I was pretty sure I could take my bo (staff) and clean house with it, if they would allow Japanese samurai to attend their gatherings. I understand they have gotten much better.

Anyway, that's my nostalgia hit for this week. Stay tuned. Never know when I might start flashing the peace sign and saying, "Groovy. Faaar ooout, man ..."

Let the Sun Shine In

So I got an email from a guy I ran with back in the days when were were all gonna move to the acreage in Arkansas and live on the land in peace and harmony, far out, dude.

It was toward the end of the sixties. (Actually the Sixties ran from JFK's assassination until Nixon resigned, way I count 'em, so there was some overlap into the seventies. Especially in Louisiana, where things got there later than they did in, say, California. Or anywhere, save Mississippi ...)

Take the WayBack Machine: Nixon was gone, the war was lost and winding down. The hippies, without that focus, were growing up, looking for jobs, raising kids, and being at least partially-absorbed back into the mainstream. Our wild oats were sown, and it was time to make sure the kids had shoes and a reliable roof.

We met when we were living on the farm next to the Mississippi levee, in Brusly, Louisiana. We were next door neighbors: one set of hippies, a second set of hippies, extended families, then there was the dairy farm past us ....

My buddy and his wife, who eventually came to live with us for a few months after we got kicked out of the River Road house, had split. He moved off to New Orleans. His ex- eventually headed out west somewhere, and we lost touch, since we also took off for Oregon.

Been thirty years since I heard from him. I googled his name a couple times, and his ex-wife's, too, but couldn't find them.

A lot of folks I'm still curious about what happened to them, but sometimes, I worry that the past is better left in fond memory. I'd hate to find out that the woman who first showed us yoga and once lived in a cave for a year grew up to be a Republican ...

Then, out of the blue, a note: Ole Jim was coming to town for a conference, and would I be interested in getting together?

Oh, you bet. I know what thirty years has done to my face. I'm really interested to see what is has done to his.

Like that old Dave Mason song:

Been away/ Haven't seen you in a while/ How've you been?/ Have you changed your style?/And do you think/ That we've grown up differently ... ?

Wow, the Colors, Man, the Colors ...

Throughout all of human history, people have sought -- and found -- all manner of ways to alter their consciousness. Pick a place and time, and, bet the farm -- somebody there was getting stoned.

These ways range from beer and wine and distilled spirits to all manner of plants that provide a width swath of mind-altering chems, to exercise, fasting, breathing, you name it. The default mindset isn't enough for some folks, and they want to enhance it.

Among these brainchangers is a class of chems come to be known as psychedelics.

LSD, discovered by accident by a German chemist looking for something else entirely, is among the more recent mind-benders. Long before there was Sandoz, there were morning glory seeds, cacti, and assorted fungi.

In some cases where the original mushroom was more dangerous and there was a risk of serious medical injury or death, users would sometimes pick somebody to give it go, and then drink their urine, which would get them off without offering the same dangers.

You really have to want to trip to go that route ...

Among the fungi, the effects vary, but the magic mushroom, chiefly those of the psilocybe variety, has been sending folks on trips that are close-to-home-but-waaay-far-ranging for centuries.

One of the functions of government, it seems, is to make sure nobody has any unregulated fun, so the psychedelics as a class of drugs generally get made illegal as soon as somebody can get around to it, especially in societies with puritan ethics, such as our own. Unless you belong to certain indigenous tribes in the USA, pretty much all of the ones the government knows about are forbidden, even though some of them were legal until the government finally figured it out.

You could get pharmaceutical-grade LSD legally in the states until the early sixties, and designer drugs like MDA or MMDA popped up after that and were legal until somebody made them otherwise. Somebody is always looking for the next streetcar named Far Out ...

There is a certain obvious hypocrisy in our society about chemcially adjusting one's mind-set:

If you want to eat a magic mushroom and sit in your room grooving upon the complex patterns on your ceiling, and pretty colors, and you get caught with the fungus in hand, that will land you in jail.

If you want to have a few glasses of Southern Comfort while smoking a fat cigar, why, that's perfectly okay. Booze and tobacco make the government money, so no problem, even though both of those will kill you. (Of course, the wrong kind of mushrooms will destroy your liver, too, but not the ones that give you the nice innerspace voyage.)

It is the nature of these things that the law has to come at them crookedly. If you have a herd of dairy cows out in the back forty and some of these 'shrooms pop up on the old cow pies -- which is often where they grow -- then the law won't bother you. They can't.

The law recognizes that these things sprout wild where they will, and you cannot control the wind. Half the population would be in jail, elsewise, and that would include police, judges, preachers, and presidents.

You can squat down next to that turd-loving 'shroom and eyeball the fungus from six inches away with a platoon of State Po-lice circled around, and no problem. That's not against the law -- as long as you don't touch it.

Pluck it, however, you get busted on the spot.

More, the spores of this little mushroom, which even now you are probably inhaling with every breath, are perfectly legal. There is no psilocybin in these spores, and therefore they are not any more illegal than ragweed pollen. And there are places where you can buy these, either in the form of spore-prints or mixed with liquid inside a syringe.

Of course, these places do not in any way, shape, or form encourage you to take these spores, which are made available for study purposes only, and attempt to grow mushrooms with them. They warn you loudly and repeatedly against such things. Don't do it! they say.

Even though, if you are interested in how that process works in great detail, you can find it or a link to it from their websites, along with all the supplies necessary to grow any kind of, you know, legal mushroom you want.

Got to admire man's ingenuity. Somebody passes a law, somebody else will find a loophole in it before the ink is dry.

My hippie days are long past, and even though the parts I can remember I recall fondly, I have no desire to go back down that road. But it's interesting to know that the road is still there, even if I'm not ...