chapter one

My earliest memories are of pooing for some reason. I remember being in my room in the tiny starter house we had which was definitely getting too small with my brother John on the way. I distinctly remember climbing over the railing of my crib and pushing the poppity poppity thing with the clear plastic dome that popped colored balls around when you pushed it. I then distinctly remember pulling down my diaper and shitting on the toy. I'm not sure what happened after that. I am told my first word was no. Maybe this is why.
The second memory is actually my third early memory because as I am thinking about it, when we moved to the big house with the haunted attic on King's Highway, I can recall sitting on a rolled up rug in big, new, scary house. After that, again, I draw a blank until my younger brother and I are sharing a bath in that new bathtub and I let a turd go and try to blame him for it. This may have been the very first time I ever pinned something on my younger brother. I got very, very good at it in my later years. So I suppose this is the light-hearted reflections of a dollar store Machiavelli.
A couple other oft-told tales about my childhood that I have no recollection about, (which are brought up from time to time at family gatherings) are my head first fall off the changing table onto the cellar floor, and my early experiences with alcohol. Apparently I did not drop right off into La La land in a time conveinient to my parents and from time to time they would give me a little Baabaa filled with wine cut with water. I never got the ratio, but you can read about it in my Mother's book "raising kids the Hippy way" available in stores and from AMAZINbooks.com (Registered trademark) The way the story goes I really enjoyed the wine and it made me "a sleepy little lamb." It was also a hoot to watch me drunkenly walk into walls and fall down until, reflecting upon this practice at a later date, they determined that it wasn't as funny as the clouds of pot smoke made it seem at that time. I can only surmise that they ran out of pot one night or something, whatever. So what you hold in your hands is the true life story of someone raised by hippies who somehow survived with enough braincells intact to publish this survival manual for anyone with parents who march to the beat of their own drummer.
School defined my personality in my early years. At nap time in the Kindergarden classroom I would lay as still as a corpse, hoping against hope that the person who was in charge of giving out stickers to the best sleepers would see how well I was napping. It was all too exciting. When I would hear the sticker person walking towards me on my mat I'd desperately want to peek, but also be afraid that I would be caught and thus lose the precious sticker. I became a sticker whore. And drunk with the power of being a sticker person I would rain harsh justice on those who twitched their eyeballs or had denied me stickers when they were on duty. Human beings learn early how pettiness and politics work.
School seemed easy to me since my father was a book salesman for a time and had all of these early reading books in shelves around the house. I'm not saying I taught myself to read or anything like that, but the process was facilitated by the fact that I had the very same books in my home. So I took to reading like an otter takes to waterfalls and my only rivals for academic dominance of the ABZ's were three really cute little girls, Diedre Evans, Mary Ann something or other and the Sophia Loren of the elementary school, the always stunning, dark-eyed beauty, Susan Black. If Oprah was still around I'd be writing her a letter right now about this girl. We would have a tearful televised reunion. She would not say "Harry who?" Sadly, forces conspired to keep our love unrequitted and that is the true story of my life. A life of emptiness and a longing for the one who got away, really early in the proceedings.
Kindergarden was a whirlwind of perfect papers for the four real scholars in the room. Whatever the topic, whatever the subject, our four hands would rocket into the air.
"Oooh, Oooh!"
(Pickmepickmeee callonmepickmeeeeeepickmeeeee!!!)
We were carefully molded into silent answer machines. The "Oooh's" were slowly hammered out of our systems as the teacher would ask for "really quiet children who know the answer and can raise their hands without making any noises." This was Agony! But I complied, and this compliance is what turned me into the helpful, people-pleasing person that I am today.
Speaking of rockets, it was about this time that my sleep was interrupted to watch some fake-ass moon landing. Even my 5 year old brain could see that there was something wrong with the reflections, the shadows and the way the stars twinkled. It was obvious at the time, but that's not this story.
At this time my parents were very involved with national politics and local causes. The draft was in full swing and body bags were still being shown on the news. Frequently there were members of the Camden 28 or some other radical at out house, plotting this or that action. The Camden 28 were a group who broke into the draft offices to burn and pillage and the twenty eight refers to the number of them who got caught and arrested. It was an exciting time to be a kid in a wagon, yelling "PEACE NOW, PEACE NOW" with all the other people. Walking over bridges and going to Washington DC on busses full of fried chicken sharing radicals. Hippies and Yippies naked or in the trees. We never got tear gassed that I can recall, maybe that was part of the reason for our involvement. I was supposed to become a "Warrior for Peace" and it is only in the last ten years or so that I am slowly coming into bloom. I made a 25 year detour into the world of personal violence that is rugby. Now I'm ready to fight for my Mother Earth. It's what I was raised to do. This a chronicle of that journey.


Below is some crap I started on but never finished about being a bee. its not very long or very interesting. this is for the dirctors cut only, the "making of" DVD with extra features, but the editors have insisted that I leave it in as a break form the waxing of rhapsodies that forecame.

I am the bee who hangs out around the hive, eating honey and lazily browsing the internet, working out a little to stay ready for action, updating this blog, playing small stakes poker online and generally just living each day as it comes unitl that fateful day. The fateful day comes and I'm racing for the prize, doing what I do best and then all of a sudden I'm homless again. Those worker bees are full of resentment at my relaxed life style. They take it personally when I tell them my mantra "work is for suckers". Some worker bee's even take it personally as a critique of teir relationship with work. It's not. It's just me and my fucked up relationship with work and money. I just don't see the point in laboring for pennies and torturing my artistic soul enriching some capitalist as he lives his avaristic lifestyle in the final days of our species. There's better things for me to do. This is one of them. This is my scribble on the wall. This is what I know about life and the nasty cocksuckers who run the world and why I'm not motvated at all by pictures of dead slaveowners, hedonists and other pillars of industry who sternly stare at me from fecal crusted cocaine tainted green cloth swatches that allegedly make the world go round. Not my world. I'm a fucking rugby playing buddhist baby. Sit back and relax and hear the tale of how I gradually became the monument to efficiency that you see before you now, paragon of pointlessness, willow in the breeze, no harm doing, green lover of mother earth and all other mothers and aging tiger that just doesn't want to be poked. that's all. Don't poke the tiger. Wait, I mean the drone who until recently was a tiger but quit the tiger business recently when this drone lifestle became my modus operandi....

Report on possible subversive elements in the Demoocratic Party in Moorestown New Jersey, February 14th, 1969.

I joined the First Baptist Church on Main St. Moorestown a year ago and this is the yearly status update as ordered.

Subject William Henry Baker recently elected as the Head of the Democratic Party in Moorestown holds regular wednesday night meetings for the party as well as bi-weekly more informal radicalized meetings on various nights in the Basement of the Church. Other agencies have informed us that leaders of the Camden 28 have been seen entering and leaving the Church for these informal meetings and surveilled that the goings on inside are smoky, furtive and non-scheduled. We have reason to suspect that the quantities of Marijuana being consumed at these meetings are not enough to warrant a full scale raid at this time with this agent so close to penetrating this inner circle and prefer to continue on with the casual surveillance until such a time as other developed sources indicate that their "big thing" is about to "go down."
In one of the formal Wednesday night meetings a representative of the Poor Peoples Party for Economic Justice, John Henry(possibly a pseudonym), gave a short speech and call for aid. He referenced the informal meetings obliquely to many snickers in the audience and one of the snickerer's is someone who I have actively building a rapport with over Marijuana Cigarettes after the Wednesday night meetings. They have a very strict no drugs policy at the regular weekly meetings. I feel that I am quite close to getting an invite to the secondary meeting and request that you triple my monthly alotment of Acapulco Gold to facilitate this occurence.

Subject John Adamczyk is the Reverend at First Baptist and seems to be the conduit for the more radicalized elements of the Party and has the Jesuit zeal for trouble making that Daniel Beregan is formenting across the land. He is the one who brought the criminal draft dodgers the Camden 28
into the Moorestown meeting and for sunday service. (See my report dated 12/16/68 for a complete dossier of what I was able to overhear at this day long meet and greet radicalization event featuring speeches from the Communist and Poor Peoples PArty as well as recently bailed members of the Camden 28)
The next major outing is a bus trip to the Washington Mall. This is in support of the antiwar rally being organized by members of the Black Panther Party and Abby Hoffman. At this time no known members of the Panthers have been seen in the Baptsit church but I have heard accounts of such meetings at some of the homes of the Camden 28 in West Camden. The communists that I have met and spoken to at these events seemed out of date and more interested in getting high than anything else. I suggest we reallocate resources from the surveillance of them to more active members of the counter culture community J. Edgar Hoover be damned. Leave that in. I really feel that the reds are an anachronism and that the truly dangerous operators are the radicalized youth of rich parents who can actually get some things done using their access to capitol and connections between their fathers' social circles. An effort has to be made to fracture the growing student cohesiveness and one way would be to shut down that MIT fool Timothy Leary. He gives the rich dissaffected eggheads a hero and he must be dealt with harshly in this field operatives opinion.

I apologize for the blunt assessments I may have made and it is not my intention to malign any other intelligence assets, I am merely trying to provide the fullest information as I see it from my undercover posting in the hippy community. I can't wait to get a haircut and a shave but I agree with the assessment of my superiors who think that I am close to penetrating the inner circle of this town's hippy elite and that this is worthwhile work. My assessments are based on how I see them allocating their resources and of the relative strength of various subversive elements and conjecture concerning possible future plans and threat summaries follow this report in section II. This is a snapshot of the community as I see it at this date, weekly detailed reports are also included in section III.

-respectfully xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx-

CHAPTER 2

Something drew me to word on the page. Luck? Good teachers? Bedtime stories read energetically? My favorite book, hands down was "the Little Engin that could." That train had some problems to deal with that seemed monuimental. But with a little Stuart Smalley style self affirmation the little fucker said to himself, "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can." Up the hill he went with his load of toys for the good boys and girls. Duty. Steadfast determination. Fighting the good fight. Powerful stuff, to be the among the first things crammed into my burgeoning conciousness. You are who you think you are. I thought I was a star. And soon I was one.
School was a blast back then because I was clearly one of the dominant intellects in the room. First grade was where I learned to cheat the system a bit. Games where you were supposed to hide your head and then pick out where the hidden object was or who it was that pressed your thumb down were easy to grift. I found that by peeking under my crossed arms I could see enough of the action to fill in the blanks afterward, the color of someone's shirt, the general area they were moving towards. It was somewhere in here that I began to lose faith in the omnipotent all knowing teacher. I learned that the world was there for the taking and soon embarked on a legendary crime spree. I still have thousands of baseball cards that made it past underpaid cashiers at the Woolworths, nestled in my underwear. And when I was finally caught it was for the sheer audacity of stealing a Peanuts book from the front window of the same store. I ignored my brothers warning that the clerk had seen me and brazenly tried to just buy some gum. That led to an hour in the manager's office and a phine call home and all I could think about was how uncomfortable it was to be sitting on ten packs of baseball cards that they had not seen.
Before I became this budding anarchist I was all about indoctrination. Every film I saw in school was instantly credible. All the warnings, heeded, zealously. Whether it was the old "Duck and Cover" turtle telling me how to survive a nuclear blast, or the pollution owl, I was all about it. On one torrential morning in my pre-anarechist days my brother, the neighbor kid Davey and I were basically swimming to school through a monsoon. A car pulls up. The window rolls down.
"You kids want a ride to school?" says the man.
My brother and Davey jump right in. I say "No way, stranger, what are you doing Eric?"
The dude in the car says, obviously, "It's OK, come on in, look at the door of my car."
On the door was an emblem of the Moorestown school district. I walk away saying "No thanks, stranger"
Three of them in the dry car are pleading with me to get in and get out of the rain. They may begin to call me names. I am steadfast. These are the same two assholes in the dry car that have invented the game "run away from Harry". These are thew two who still play the game from time to time despite it being banned by parental authority. I'll show them who follows the rules I say to myself getting soaked to the skin. I recall walking at least half a block while the car matched my progress, with flashers on and the occupants beseeching me to come to my senses. The emblem looked real. I caved. Was this the turning point in my life where my will power was shown to be less than G. Gordon Liddy-esque? Three against one I fought the good fight. But I caved. The Little Engine that Caved. A modern day tale of a loser nobody who bent to the rules of an insane society. Unless in that bending I unconciously incorporated the first lessons of the zen path. Bending like the willow in the wind. Picking my battles.
One Monday after a Peace rally in Washington I showed up in school and the woman I lived to please, my second grade te4acher, goddess of the worksheet and fountain of all knowledge was not at her desk. Instead was a substitute teacher straight from central casting. Ebracing the cliche' and owning it he was reading the Inquirer at his desk as we filtered into the room. Still having the teacher pleasing personality ingrained into me I approached the desk and immediately found a way to curry favor with this powerful new presence in my world. I was sure to be the bestest kid ever in his note to our regular teacher. I could feel it. I confidently poited to the headline on the front page and said proudly "I was there!" and before I could breathlessly recout the busride and the fried chicken and the naked people in the trees this total douchebag siad to me, "what kind of parent would take their kids to something like that?"
I was FLOORED. This may have been the genesis of my crime spree. It was definitely the first crack in the Parthenon. The wool was being pulled from my eyes. Teachers could be assholes! And to go at my parents neck like that, man, homie, he did not want to go there at all. So I busted a cap in his ass which resulted in my being placed into a kid jail until my eighteenth birthday which is where I am writing this from as we speak. this is the sroty of the Lord of the Flies, Kermit the frog, Leige of the Lily pad and lover of pigs, the other white meat. Pigs, smarter than a second-grader and ever so much more delicious. I thionk it was right about this time that I had my first psychotic break from realty.
It was a struggle for me to learn to tie my shoes for some reason. Inhabitants of the groves of Academe' as I was, deconstructing the post-radical feminist phenomenolgy of classic texts of Dick, Jane and Sally with thier dog spot and kitty fluffy. I was programmed to see that all dogs were male and all cats were female. So I was definitely not the kind of kinesthetic, hands on builder of things and tieing my shoes was incredibly frustrating for me. So I invented an uncle. Who taught me the bunny-bunny method of tying shoes. I was lost when i was told that the rabbit chases itself around the bush and into the hole. Whatever. i was in second grade. I did not get metaphors yet. I was still a concrete learner. One afternoon, sun-dappled if memory serves, I was in my room crouching by my door and this uncle dude is instructing me in this new technology, the bunny bunny technique. To tie the bunny bunny knot, instead of having just one bunny chasing iteslf into a hole or whatever (which I still don't get) one makes two bunny ears and ties them together as on would tie a regulat knot. It was easy. It got the job done and I was ever so happy to get that particular monkey off my back. My mother was surprised and happy that she didn't have to tie them anymore and asked me how I learned it? I told her that uncle somebody had just shown me and got a blank look. There is no uncle somebody she told me. I insisted and gave her the details and she just got a really funny look on her face and changed the subject to her pride in my having mastered this task.
Third grade was all about kangaroo rats for me. I was obsessed. The Encyclopedia Brittanica had a great series of pictures of these wily little rodents outwitting a rattle snake. Kicking sand at the snake or simply sailing thru the sky, these little desert rodents captured my imagination. I was constantly working them into conversations, or pictures or stories. No one loved them like I did. I spent years in that Encyclopedia. The teacher that year was a little less enthusiastic, but I still thought school was pretty cool. This was the year that my world changed. I was no longer the platonic academic equal of Susan Black. The walks home down Shady Lane stopped somewhere around here. My brother and Davey would walk straight, I would walk with Susan up the hill and then take a left on Shady Lane. It seemed natural. She was the only one I wanted to talk too. Davey could walk my brother home. I could take the slightly longer way and catch up to them later when Susan eventually took the turn to her house on Main Street. Who knows what we talked about? It just seemed natural to extend the schoolday with the other genius in the class. Collegial discussions of the night's homework. How awesome kangaroo rats were. Wasn't it funny at lunch when the milk came out of so and so's nose? Then science intervened and ruined our love. Technology seperated the two of us as it so often does, factionalizing us into two seperate, competing groups. Once colleagues we were now at opposite sides of the spectrum. Cooties hit the third grade like a hurricane.
I was devestated when I heard the truth about boy germs and girl germs. I sure didn't want to risk infection. I was alarmed that by holding your hand over another boy's head someone counting could quiclky tally up the number of girlfriends you had until you put both hands aorund your neck and called "safety". A schoolyard full of kids choking themselves or counting or spraying themselves with cootie spray out of their index finger whenever they encountered girl germs or boy germs. This was the year that true love died. Killed by that demon, science. Caught in a wave of hysteria I zealously sprayed and choked myself and found a new way home, secure in the knowledge that the science was on my side. Much like those today who feel jet fuel can magically burn at a temperature that would melt the very steel that the jet engines and buildings are made of.
This was the year of the Presidential election. With my father being the head of the town's Democratic party there were all sorts of posters on our front porch and people in and out of our house. Nixon was up for re-election against Eugene McCarthy. In school we were told to make election posters up to hang on the wall. The walls were awash with Nixonian slogans, the worst one was the one with Snoopy's alter ego on it, "Vote for Nixon, or Joe Cool. There were three Democratic posters. Mine, my brother's and Davey's. It was a landslide in our hallways and at the polls.
Davey was a year older. He was into baseball cards and Archie. He had his own comic books strip about a fish named chip. He was going to be a shortstop for the Mets. I liked the Pirates and Roberto Clemente. I think it was Davey who got most of my good baseball cards in savvy trades for Pirates players. I still don't have a Willie Mays or a Mickey Mantle. But thats okay, Davey was my hero. He was the youngest of five and the shit his nrother's were into like Godspell was so much cooler than antything I was into. They would build snow models of the submarine Nautilus in their backyard in the snow, play flashlight tag and the sisters would baby sit us. His mom Louise taught my mom to garden and quickly addressed the fact that I flashed her with a warning of severe consequences if I did it again. I could not imagine being Davey-less so I kept my weiner in my pants from that point on. They had a room full of guinea pigs on the back of their house which would beg for food in a guinea pig chorus everytime you walked into their house.