June 2, 2002

• “Empower me.”

  I’m on the laptop again, so by the time this shows up on Xanga, it will have spent the night on this hard drive and/or the little black disk with the tiny illegible sticker. This thing’s last battery will hold a charge for no more than a few seconds, so it must have that umbilical thingie snaking back to a power supply somewhere. I can live with that. But my umbilical thingie is plugged into the same power strip as the worklight on my jewelry bench over there by the computer where the kid is. He has these marvelous powers of concentration that have been dxed as ADD. He’s playing a game. To get his attention, I say, “Hey!  Kid?  Turn on the power strip… I need power over here… empower me!” That did it. And now….

  High Hookups,

  in which the semi-famous psychic shamelessly shows off a few tenuous connections with the truly famous and the merely notorious.

  Fame is capricious and fickle. We don’t all get the notice we deserve, and some get much more than they can handle. I have some modest fame myself, as the “Fu-Bar Lady”, developer of the recipe for the world-famous all-natural healthy organic herb and spice fruit and nut bar cookies. And I have easily a thousand second- or third-degree connections such as my step-father working for Sammy Davis, Jr.’s eye surgeon or my shooting speed in a bathtub with a roadie for the Greatful Dead.

  When I arrived early once for a Hells Angels benefit concert in San Francisco in the late 1960s, I stood down by the stage during set-up and sound checks, and schmoozed with Janice Joplin.  After I complimented her on her baggy vintage pastel silk dress, she complimented me on my skin-tight black jeans.
  

  There was the time, a couple of years later, when my boyfriend the Hulk took me to Ken Kesey’s farm and we passed the chillum and hit up some crank in the old chickenhouse that used to be Mountain Girl’s room. Rubbing elbows with Merry Pranksters over a span of a few years produces some moments like that.

  Years later, work would bring me into contact with some music celebrities. I worked security at some Anchorage concerts in the ‘Seventies.  The high point of that chapter of my career was passing joints onstage with Kiss while our whole security crew sat on the edge of the stage to keep the fans back. The rest was just a lot of crazy work with an excellent soundtrack. The NDN rock group Redbone were a rude bunch of assholes, and Tina Turner is a genuine sweetheart, lucid and luminous.

  In one of my past lives, I had close friends among the actors who worked with Will Shakespeare; and in another, that little gimp Toulouse-Lautrec used to stand in the wings to watch me dance.

  That was nothing… well it was something, but nothing like the awesome thrill of having been in an auditorium at a little community college in 1968, hearing Gregory Bateson talk about the coming Cybernetic Revolution.  He nailed it!  He knew that nobody knows how this is going to turn out. And he knew that henceforth and forever, everything has been changed by these machines. He knew so much more than just that… if you’ve not had the pleasure, read some of his stuff sometime. Talk about lucid and luminous! Bateson deserves a lot more notice than he’s ever gotten. Through his recorded and published words, that man continues, twenty-some years after he left this plane, to enlighten and empower us.

  • 9:57 am
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