Plucking the Stone

The deep mind underlies the superficial mind. Much as the stones on the bottom of a clear, swiftly flowing stream are blurred by the rushing water above, the deep mind can be detected, but not directly experienced except by tactile sensation. It forms the substrate over which the everyday mind blithely and blindly courses. When the irregularities of younger, less polished rocks–perhaps recently kicked into the stream by a startled deer or careless hiker–produce increased friction with the water, creating a minute disturbance of flow almost too small to detect and perhaps bloodying the plantar surface of your wading feet, you take more notice, but the visual input is no more clear than before. Mind you, the water is extremely clean, but the current obscures detail.

Imagine now that you could halt the downstream flow, just for a second or two. What would you see? That’s the deep mind. You can find it by carefully moderating your relentless speed-surfing of neural circuits. Slow, or even stop the current, and pluck one smooth stone from the bottom.

•  •  •

Note: None of this applies to Petaluma. 

© Pseudocognitive

Part V: The Zodiac Killer is born. Self esteem in 1968. Good fishermen don’t steal from the dead.

There’s a gate here, but it’s not the original. Sturdy steel, clad in chipped yellow paint, it serves as the latest in a decades-old succession of useless structures designed to warn you that someone wants you to go back the way you came, but doesn’t feel strongly enough to do something serious about it. If you climb over the gate, or squeeze between its horizontal bars, or go around it to the left or the right (be careful of small dead mammals and used condoms and nails and rusty sheet metal screws and broken glass, and ticks who wait and wait, desperately clinging to the ends of quivering stalks on the off-chance that you’ll be their one true blood meal)--if you keep going and take this road, well then, you’re probably a damned idiot and I shouldn’t care what mess you find yourself in. I’ll warn you anyway, though, because I cannot bear to see a person run afoul of badness.


The road is made of dirt and gravel, and it runs south from the little turn-out on Lake Herman Road where Zodiac claimed his first victims in the cold waning minutes of Autumn in 1968. There are many stories about what might wait for you down this road, and most of them are as authentic as Carol Doda’s breasts. That is, they contain a lot of artificial filling, but are held in place by just enough truth to get the job done. It is within this zone of jiggling, fleshy semi-reality that we must complete our examination of Zodiac’s motives for his heinous acts. This little dirt road on the outskirts of Benicia is a good place to do it, but first you have to get here.

Click for larger image

We pick up the thread of the non-redacted and empirically deficient Zodiac Killer profile and pseudo-history where we left it: August 30, 1968. Zodiac was on that day some 43 crow-flyin’ miles to the northeast, enduring a blistering 106 degree afternoon mowing his cousin’s lawn-bowling court under an unforgiving Sacramento sun. It was the only work he could get after breaking nearly all of his fingers in a martial arts zydeco competition the month before. Before the day was out, Zodiac would adopt his now famous moniker for the first time, and to this day his cousin Biff wonders if perhaps he was the one who unwittingly set the whole thing in motion.

Zodiac left the River City determined to lighten his mood. Cousin Biff's self esteem was always sore, like it had just finished passing a stool of large caliber and insufficient moisture content. Biff never acknowledged this, since no one in 1968 even knew what self esteem was. On this occasion, he’d taken that permanently negative head-state and turned it on Zodiac, castigating him repeatedly for his unfamiliarity with power lawnmowers. Zodiac had been raised on the high plains of the Dakotas and knew only of the scythe and the goat as methods of grass management. He endured Biff’s taunts for as long as he could, then made as if to kill him with his boning knife. Biff fled to the neighbors’, and Zodiac took his car, a fine, ten year old glossy black Cadillac.

Zodiac drove that car in a style of wild, anti-cognitive abandon, later  employed by Charlie Sheen as he piloted the craft that carried his boss, Mike Huckabee, to little country grocery stores and juke joints all across the south. This whip was a mighty fine automobile, and its twin dorsal fins cleaved the hot, dry air like glistening machetes slicing through beef jerky. Speeding south on Franklin toward the county line, he thought he just might outrace his demons for good this time.

Click for larger image

Rio Vista Bridge

Arriving in Rio Vista (a better town than Petaluma), Zodiac sought relief from the heat. He pulled off the main road and found a shady spot under the bridge just inside the city limits. A hobo named Bob approached and offered some advice: Stay out of the old part of town, because the police chief was an inveterate gambler who was always looking for vagrants to lock up, stealing their cash to place bets on the dog fights in Paintersville. Zodiac told the old bum he wasn’t a vagrant, and Bob replied that a vagrant was anyone the chief wanted him to be. He said this while picking at his scalp, and I am moved at this time to reflect that many luckless people seem to do their best thinking while using their sharp, unclipped nails to gently tweeze hemophages from their heads. I figure it must have something to do with patience, the time to exercise that patience, and the bitter beauty of self discovery so often rendered inaccessible to polite society. That’s a load of crap and you know it.

Bob’s home was under the Highway 12 bridge on the banks of the deceptively languid Sacramento. He had an old pink lawn chair and some fishing equipment and a good view of the river.

What he didn’t have anymore was his .38, having lost it on a bet with some bikers from Cordelia. Zodiac took advantage of the opportunity, putting four slugs from his grandpop’s Army Colt right into Bob’s smooth forehead. Damn, but didn’t that old man have an unnaturally smooth forehead before he got shot.


Afterward, Zodiac took Bob’s fishing rod over to the pier and caught a few undersized stripers, which he kept to eat later. Unbothered by the  conscience he didn’t have, he saw no difference between killing a harmless old man, breaking fish and game laws, and indexing the dominance hierarchy of gulls as they quarreled over bits of tuna sandwiches tossed skyward by a screaming mob of first graders shepherded by two harried teachers.

Given the choice, would you lead a simple existence under a bridge, free to fish for whatever swims beneath the streaking traffic above, beholden to no one, or would you keep accumulating useless things and sunbathing in the glowing accolades of your fair-weather friends for your ultimately insignificant contributions to society? Bob tossed all that aside, voluntarily. It’s a powerfully tempting thought sometimes, to just shuck it all and take up residence near a pier jutting into a fabled waterway, offering opinions to all who pass regardless of their political or religious affiliation, wearing a red boatman’s cap and calling boisterously to those rich bastards floating by on their mahogany or fiberglass-hulled dick-replacements. Warning them to tell the rest of their tax-dodging, hand-washing brethren that in the end they’re nothing more than maggot shit and rich fertile loam, same as everyone else. If I were to adopt the Way of the Hobo, I’d tell those property-grabbing bastards they don’t know how to kick-start a recalcitrant mule, let alone a V-twin motorcycle. I’d challenge ‘em to go ahead and stop that boat, and ahoy there you sons o’ bitches hop on up here and I’ll show you what real life can do to a man’s face. Pull yourself on up here, you pinched-face pikers.
I dare you.
 

Zodiac became Zodiac when he killed Bob and found an old, wrinkled horoscope in the dead man’s back pocket: “You will see a mountain, cloak a visage, master the photovoltaic arts, quarter a circle, and eat a mango.”
 

© Pseudocognitive

Daily Journal: Bad Noir and the Nun's Ovaries

June 12, 1958 - Petaluma, California

Raptors woke me before I was ready. It was cold, so I found a discarded blanket, the value of which cannot be overstated except by those who senselessly appreciate reality. Snead was waiting, tapping his feet impatiently on the pavement and leaning on his low-slung purple brougham. I asked him for a spare magazine, because he always went into a fight over-prepared and I had used the opposite tactic on more than one occasion. He gave me a dog-eared Argosy. Worthless pulp and I told him so. He shot me in the gonadal vicinity but only hit one. Nature’s redundancy is awesome.
The next day I drove Snead’s car to the Jiffy Lube to get some bottles of fine beer. I prefer to drink my brew from a brown bottle, not green or clear, and they have some good lager over there. The owner, Marge, gave her ovaries to a nun who’d renounced her vows, and ever since my cars ran bad but I never wanted for beer. Marge is a decent woman but her skinny no-good husband Mixer Man is a bumbling failure at the serial killing arts. He’s always letting people escape and run through the shop. I’ve already decided to throw him to the carnivorous tadpoles in the Amazon drainage but I can’t bear to tell Marge. She collects vintage pickles.“Why won’t you just follow directions for once, you motherfucking fuckers?” This was Mix (a lover of redundancy himself). He couldn’t get his latest victim sweepstakes contestants to agree on the order of their demise. He finally gave up when the fastest of them kicked him in his smallberries. Most of the same lot would be back next week anyway, and pickles don’t go bad.

© Pseudocognitive

Deadhouse Seven

This was down along the tracks next to an old slaughterhouse on the outskirts of some forsaken town, possibly Petaluma on a good day. I can’t remember if it really was Petaluma, or just some other bad town where people fool themselves into believing they are more important to the cosmos than termite endosymbionts or stable flies. I do remember there was a deputy who stopped and warned me off the property a little while before I snapped this shot with my Instamatic. His car was bronze and white like Sacramento County Sheriff’s cars used to be, back in the sixties. If anyone knows where this place is, let me know, because I would like to put the memory in its proper context. Maybe Petaluma doesn't actually deserve the blame this time.

© Pseudocognitive

Oakdale, California

They ride. Never mind they started six episodes into season one, or that those helmets are the ones the dealer told ‘em they’d need if they wanted to fit in, or that a fifty mile radius around Main Street still stands unchallenged. At first, the bike was just a religiously DVR’ed plasma screen idea. Now, it’s steel and rubber and chrome and leather and chitinous shrapnel hitting their cheeks and yellow guts on the the leading edge of their Levis and—the one time they gave that V-twin a proper wrist cracking out on 120 just after sunset—the powerful grit-wake of an oncoming Peterbilt. Now they feel it. There are many layers to all of this, and maybe they've found theirs. Who am I to argue?

•••••

Note: This is a photo of a nice couple on a Harley Davidson. Characterizations are wholly speculative, and NOTHING negative is implied. Oakdale is better than Petaluma. I would not say this if it weren’t true, so believe it.

Post and photo © Pseudocognitive All rights reserved, forever.

BLOGGING UNDER THE INFLUENCE. Jenny McCarthy's insanity. I said Jumanji!

I haven’t had distilled alcohol since 1986.  This Old No. 7 is good stuff.  One cup is enough.
(Slightly edited 9 February 2014.)
Lots of people, lots of blogs. Here’s where to get a good burrito.  There’s a place to avoid in the event of a tsunami.  I’ll show you how to promote your business and make money from domain names named after 14th Century philosophers and 70′s porn stars.  Grow your mustache and lead the invasion of Normandy as you wound your heart with a monotonous languor. Sell your house this way. Flip your house that way and join the ranks of the rich bastards. Drink these berries from the foothills of the Himalayas.  Feel like an activist by following me on Twitter while twirling with Mylar-festooned ears in the moonlit streets on a quiet night in Mill Valley.  Beware of cell phone antennae–they might fry your ‘nads in the event of seismic activity. I’m a guerrilla marketer, pay for my drink. Lock up vandals. Graffiti artists are not vandals. Yes they are. No they aren’t. Ban guns! Guns for tots! Liberty is just another word for nothin' left to lose. Ron Paul Rand Paul Ted Cruz! We're the Good Guys With Guns! We're the Good, Caring Humans With No Guns! Petaluma is a great place–visit my pro-Petaluma blog.  Petaluma is a festering sore on the ass end of a syphilitic chicken.  Petaluma Poultry sells only free range organic chickens and is exempt from all negative Petaluma characterizations.  Rocky the Range Chicken is a healthy source of animal protein.  Republicans are bad.  Democrats are bad.  Democrats are good.  Republicans–pass the beer nuts.  Watch the cops–videotape ‘em when they violate your 4th Amendment rights.  Support the cops and give them your cell phone cameras. Stop whining about law enforcement officers and just quit being an asshole! Take back our streets from the criminals and gang members.  Gangs only exist because children need love. Lock up the gangsters.  Free the children.  Learn martial arts by watching this DVD and reading my blog.  I reviewed a book.  I read a book.  I wrote a book.  Read my Star Trek fan fiction.  I want to be an extra on Sons of Anarchy.  I have a story-line idea for Sons of Anarchy.  Sons of Anarchy is a TV show–it’s not real.  It is too real; I saw them in Temecula.  Rio Vista!  This movie sucks.  This movie is the best movie of the year.  Don’t contaminate our drinking water with fluoridation.  Autism is caused by vaccines and Jenny McCarthy is a powerful creature capable of shooting flaming napalm from her nipples at the eyes of people who dare to speak up against what she knows to be true because after all, post hoc, ergo propter hoc.  Lock up aggressive panhandlers.  Lock up Jenny McCarthy.  Lock up scientifically illiterate parents who endanger their kids and everyone else's by refusing to vaccinate based on their own voluntary ignorance. The Book of Eli is propaganda of the religious right, and I for one am surprised that Denzel Washington agreed to star in it. The Book of Eli is a cautionary tale about the dangers of pseudo-digitizing complex analog phenomena and actually has very little to do with religion.  Aw, you’re both full o’ crap.  Protect the panhandling community from aggressive cops on steroids. Tase the violent, freeloading panhandlers into submission! War is not healthy for panhandlers and other living things! I'll hit you with this cast iron pan if you try to pry my mobile device from my cold, dead fingers! Get US outta the U.N.  Frank Burns eats worms.  One nation . . . way messed up.  The best nation on Earth.  One nation under God.  One nation NOT under god.  One nation founded on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  One nation founded on genocide and slavery.  Hot dogs will kill you. It’s possible to make a fertilizer bomb using sausage casings.  Just kidding. NSA, please disregard. The British Navy stopped issuing rum and I blame Jenny McCarthy. The British Navy will kill you. Don't let the British navy kill you. I got sixteen hits on one of my blog posts today.  Fourteen of ‘em were from bots.

Cold fish, midnight sky
Pulls the stars across his gills
The moon in his eye

Jumanji, you rifle wielding wanker!  I said JUMANJI !




Bleary-eyed morning-after edit: Just so we’re clear, Jenny McCarthy should be billed for the medical expenses of every child who contracts pertussis.  Since there’ve been some some fatalities that wouldn’t have occurred if not for her exploitation of the disturbingly widespread scientific illiteracy of the American public, she really ought to be incarcerated as well.  Since no legal means exist to further that end, I guess I’ll just have to hope that one day she becomes smarter than a 5th grader.
                                 

Post and photo © Pseudocognitive All rights reserved, forever.

One Paragraph Town: Petaluma

No, this isn't a Prius. It's a Karmann Ghia, and for all I know it's headed to Berryessa.

Petaluma has some interesting old buildings, but it's full of chicken feathers and Priuses. Any hints of nostalgia or dreams or similarly valued states are rendered moot by that peculiar mix of hubris, pseudo-friendliness and quiet despair so ubiquitous in small towns. The last time I rode through, the place produced in me a torpor that lingered until I reached the wide spot known as Valley Ford, on the way to Bodega. There, an old man named Pete recounted the time back in ’68 when he went into the diner and announced that if they served his eggs over-cooked just one more time he’d nail ‘em to the wall as a warning to others. Those eggs are still there. They were laid by chickens in Petaluma.

© Pseudocognitive

Addendum: In all fairness, I must make it clear that there are a few bright spots in that hellish little town, such as the various filming locations used in the George Lucas classic "American Graffiti." In addition, the city's lone refreshing counterpoint to the usual foul nature of the fowl business can be experienced by sampling the severely tasty free range birds at Petaluma Poultry.