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  91Mar30 11:41 am from Devin Jones
    Colin,you should write a book on your life... from all the storys I've 
heard from you..  it'd be interesting.. 

   91Mar30 2:37 pm from Diablo
You're right Devin.  Its not only that "interesting" things have happenned to 
colin; interesting things happen to everyone.  Its that he knows how to tell 
stories well.  Colin, I'd also be interested in reading such a book. 

   80Jan01 3:50 am from Devin Jones
Ahh, Diablo, I aggre fully.  But I know the interesting things that happend to 
me.  (Wouldn't really want to read about them)  And I've never heard of any 
interesting things that have happend to very many other people..  So I guess 
its just that Colin is more open about his life than the rest of us that makes 
it look like he has led an exceptionally interesting life.  =) 

   80Jan01 4:07 am from Diablo
Well, I guess that settles it.  Colin, I expect a manuscript on my desk next 
week.  ;) 

   80Jan01 11:00 am from Wanderlust
Yeah, Colin is great at reminiscing.  He'll make a wonderful grandfather. 

   80Jan01 2:15 pm from Swagman
He may already be one, since colin is older than I am and I am old enough to 
be your father and you are old enough to have sired a whelp.  Kinda scary, eh? 

   06-Apr-91 13:51 From colin campbell
    A guy who recently turned 50 reported gloomily that his libido is already
down 50%. "You know that girl in my office with fantastic set of hooters? Well,
now I'm only interested in one."

   91Apr16 5:55 pm from colin campbell
   I have so many siblings that I can pick and choose among them whether I 
want to be friends. However I am very close to most of them, even if we live 
thousands of miles apart. Our childhood was so traumatic, and we had to be our 
own defense. We squabbled amongst ourselves, but solidified into a unit when 
threatened as a group.  
   Today we are the sole survivors of the now-sunken land of Home. Nobody else 
can know what it was like.  
   I saw the Cher movie, MASK, for the first time a couple months ago, and that 
was sort of like what our life was, except that there were 9 kids, and not 
one, and we were all hideously intelligent, but also handsome and beautiful 
instead of deformed. Two of my brothers and my sister and I were child models 
for clothing catalogs, for instance. We made $30 an hour (in the 50s) but we 
never saw the money; Mom took it and bought beer for her motorcycle-gang 
boyfriends.  
   Also, my mother didn't dress as sharp as Cher, but had bigger tits.  

   91Apr17 10:45 pm from colin campbell
   My problem has been that I retain my verbal competitiveness long after my 
intellectual overload limit has passed.  
   No siblings ever lived who didn't bicker. It's the ones who coped with 
common problems who remain friends into adulthood.  

   27Apr91 18:58:05 from colin
   Whenever I hear the phrase "police line" I think about the cops who use 
cocaine. 
   In one phase of my life I knew a bunch of cops socially. What a bunch of 
morons. They'd get drunk and suddenly handcuff you to a railing as a joke, 
ha ha ha. Or pull out their off-duty pistols and start ordering people 
around at a party, it was supposed to be funny but the guy was aiming a 
loaded gun at you. My cousin was engaged to a cop and she had a party and 
suddenly six cop cars surrounded the house, sirens and flashers going, and 
the police stormed the house. It was just a joke by my cousin's fiancee. I 
had three joints in my shirt pocket and I about shit my pants. 
   For a while I had a roommate who was a fireman. One night he got home and 
woke me up: "Hey, colin, look what we got," and he showed me a one-kilo 
brick of high grade marijuana. His squad answered an alarm at an apartment 
building, and they knocked down an attic fire, and then the firemen went 
through the apartments inspecting all walls that connected to the fire area. 
If nobody was in the apartment, the firemen broke in. My roommate Jake broke 
into one apartment and went to a closet on the endangered wall, and opened 
it up and found 20 bricks of dope. He got on the walkie-talkie and said 
"Cap, we have a situation up here in #207."  The captain came up and saw the 
stuff and agreed, and the squad of firemen each put a brick of dope into 
their jackets and then left. They took 12 bricks and left 8. 
    Smoke eaters, that's what they call firemen.

   91May22 6:59 pm from colin campbell
   My maternal grandfather was a sand hog--a caisson ditch digger. He helped 
dig the tunnel between Windsor, Canada, and Detroit, Michigan. It was pressure 
work like scuba diving today but they were cavalier about it back then and 
lots of the workers got the bends in the brain. After that work Grandpa 
freelanced as a whiskey importer (you could fit several hundred bottles of 
Canadian Club whiskey into a rowboat and carry them a half a mile across the 
river into thirsty Prohibition Detroit). In the winter you could iceskate 
across. 
   He retired from that and became a full-time alcoholic until he died at age 
58 of booze-caused bleeding ulcers.  
   That's all I know about him, except that I inherited his bowling ball. I was 
only 6 at the time and I've since lost it.  
   My paternal grandfather took one look at me five days after I was born and 
dropped dead of a stroke within the week. He was a farmer in Nova Scotia until 
the middle 20s, when he moved to Detroit to have the opportunity to make $5 a 
day at the Ford factory.  
   He was a boozer too. His wife died of a brain tumor when she was 35 (my dad 
was 11) and it was the middle of The Great Depression and he retired into 
drinking and packed my father and his brothers off to live with foster 
families. My father's great interest was in letter forms and calligraphy, and 
after WWII he took a job as a lettering man at an ad agency. Later he designed 
the Cadillac logo and then founded the Graphic Artists' Guild.  
   My verbal abilities developed astonishingly fast when I was a baby and I'm 
sure it was because of the environment. My father hung out with a remarkably 
competent crowd, and I had lots of conversations with them. My world-view grew 
considerably. Then my mother ran off with some motorcycle thugs and they had 
much less to say. "Gimme a beer, kid," was the measure of their complexity. 
 
   I have to think that kids raised in a "Gimme a beer, kid" environment will 
grow up with their cranial infonet circuitry insufficiently developed to deal 
with the real world.  

   91May22 11:43 pm from Mirror Man
Colin have you thought of writing your life story? 

   91May22 11:56 pm from Diablo
Others have brought up that idea before; I think it would be real 
interesting.  Not only because colin has lived an interesting life, but 
because he writes so well.  I actually enjoy reading several paragraphs of his 
stuff, where as with anyone else, I would skip over most of it. 

   91May22 7:07 pm from colin campbell
    All in all, I'd say my favorite drug is rhodopsin. What an eye-popping 
rush it gives you. Colors and lights everywhere. Us addicts refer to it in the 
argot as "visual purple," man.  
    The rhapsodies of rhodopsin. There's no sin like rhodopsin.  

MSG : #47/49
DATE: 22-May-91 7:28pm
FROM: Colin Campbell

   It's been a long time since I was in high school. My senior year I finally
got my varsity letter--I was on the junior varsity baseball team for two years
and then made the varsity team senior year, but they didn't give me a letter
until June 1. In order to become a member of the Varsity Club you had to go
through the hazing and I decided it wasn't worth it, because I would be
graduating in two weeks and I'd never have a chance to torture the new
guys.
   At my school you had to get the signature of 2/3 of the current members 
of the Varsity Club on a carved wooden "F" (for "Farmington") that you made
yourself in wood shop. Club members could demand any task. At lunch you'd see a
kid with a big wooden F dangling around his neck stand up on a table and sing
some stupid song.
   Anyway, this one guy was a real dick and the Varsity Club guys wanted to
make it as tough as possible. One thing about Varsity Club candidates was that
they had to wear a coat and tie to school, unlike everybody else, and for this
guy they tied the narrow end of a necktie around his dick and threaded the tie
up to his collar and left the big end dangling out in front of his shirt. He
carried a sign that asked girls to give his tie a big yank. 
   Oh, candidates were also not allowed to speak. 
   A whole bunch of girls seemed to know about the joke and they lined up to
pull that guy's tie. Ouch. 

MSG : #49/49
DATE: 23-May-91 10:40pm
FROM: Deltax

Jesus, Colin, where did you go to school? Adolf Hitler's School For Young Men?
Saddam Hussein's Academy of Higher Education? The George Patton Military 
Academy for Wayward Sons?

   91May29 6:19 pm from colin campbell
   My memory is overwhelmingly verbal and visual. I remember words in print. I 
have no visual memory of colors, though. If a beautiful girl in a skirt walks 
past and ten minutes later I'm asked "What color was that skirt?" all I can 
say is Duh. If I know I'm going to need to remember colors I can do it: I can 
say, "Her skirt is red, the car is green, the light is yellow;" as long as I 
attach verbal tags I can remember colors.  
   My ex-wife had a memory completely different from mine. She had the 
photographic kind of memory. She was a Federal agent for the IRS and wanted to 
be a Treasury agent and she took a standard police test in which they show you 
a slide of the scene of an accident for ten seconds, and then give you a 
hundred-question quiz about the picture.  What kind of purse was the woman in 
red carrying?  
   My ex turned out to be in the 99th percentile on stuff like that.  She 
wasn't in Sicko's league, though; her best IQ score was only 160. Luckily she 
was able to find work despite this score because her bust measured 38.  

   91May29 6:51 pm from Mirror Man
160 is such a pitful IQ. Yeah right. 

   91May29 8:55 pm from Swagman
Yeah, but the 38's are more fun to bump into... 

   91May29 11:14 pm from Mirror Man
remember this is Colin's Ex-Old Lady we are talking about. Show a little 
respect, unless Colin says you don't have to. Funny in all of the stories he 
has shared this is one of the first I had heard he was married. 

   91May30 5:48 am from Swagman
I always have a healthy respect for 38's, always. 

   91May30 11:03 am from colin campbell
   I don't mention my ex, Rhonda, very often because it was a long, long time 
ago. We were married in 1969 and divorced in 1974. After we split she quit the 
IRS and became a bikini parts delivery girl for an Orange County 
Harley-Davidson dealer, then met a Detroit Lions football player and moved to 
Detroit with him, then married the player's best friend, who was an 
aeronautical engineer for Boeing in Seattle. Then the engineer got a $20,000 
inheritance and Rhonda asked him if she could use the money for psychotherapy, 
she was tired of being such a whacko. Then she ran off with the therapist and 
I've never heard any more about her.  

   91May30 11:52 am from Mirror Man
Colin, this is Movie (Or soap opera material) 

   91May30 1:25 pm from Death Penguin
"As the Stomach Turns" 

   91Jun25 10:30 pm from colin campbell
   The most putrid thing I ever encountered was the dead bodies of six pigs. I 
raised pigs for a year when I was an indentured slave on a farm as a child. You 
could buy a baby pig for $20 and feed it garbage for a year and sell it for 
$500. My brother and I bought a few baby pigs and fed them and hired out a 
local boar who impregnated our female pigs and after one year we had 3 mom 
pigs and 18 baby pigs. We sold the babies for $20 each and that paid for the 
grain we'd fed the pigs over the year. Then in the second year we had dozens 
and dozens of baby pigs to sell, and we thought we'd have 5 full-grown pigs to 
sell, and then we bought a truckload of pig feed from the local agricultural 
emporium and it turned out that the pig feed had been improperly compiled. 
Instead of 95% grains and 5% salt,the feed was 60% grains and 40% salt. It was 
packed in the familiar sacks and it looked normal and we poured it into the 
pig troughs, and they gobbled it down enthusiastically.  
    About 3 in the morning I was shaken awake and told my pigs were all in 
convulsions. Seizures. We went out to the pigpens and brought the kicking, 
comatose animals to the house and poured water down their throats, according 
to advice of our big-animal veterinarian. He was swamped with complaints from all 
over the county: 30 farms were affected by the tainted pig feed.  
    Six of our big pigs died. Our original sow, Sadie, lived, but we buried the 
rest of them back by the creek. Ô
    A year later the county drove a big sewer project through our back yard and 
uncovered the pigs' mass grave. Because of the concentration of salt in the pigs' 
flesh, they hadn t decomposed much. To the dogs in the neighborhood, it was a 
ham pit, a bubbling cornucopia of salt-cured bacon.  
    Puuuuuuuuuuuuu  trid. 

 91Jun29 11:25 am from colin campbell
   My experience with engineers has been very confusing. I write brochures for 
technical companies, and the engineers are accustomed to writing manuals. 
Brochures are lots different from manuals.  
   The attitude in most manuals is, ÒYou sad sorry mother fucker, you own this 
piece of equipment now and you will be forced to read this manual, no matter 
how obscure and pedantic and unorganized it is, or else you won't be able to 
use the equipment.  
    Engineers try to write their ads and brochures the same way, but the 
readers are not required to read the damned things, and so they don't. And the 
engineers mutter about how the idiotic public doesn't read any more.  
    Sometimes I get along real well with the engineer, we have a good exchange 
of information and the brochure proceeds swiftly. Invariably, that engineer is 
fired after the 2nd draft and a new guy is assigned to the project.  
    I got along fine with the engineers at Abex Aerospace. They were defeated 
underlings in a huge company, and their attitude was that they'd never had any 
innovations approved, they were a backwater of has-beens. They were reluctant 
to talk about their own feeble projects, but I pressured them. Then at the 
meetings they would see that the other guys were working on hot projectsÑeach 
guy thought everybody else's project was hot, but not his own. Everybody 
perked up and the brochure came out very good. Was voted the best brochure of 
the year by the Ventura Ad Club. 
    Most of my problems with engineers has been engineers in management. They 
have two main goals: 1. Use terminology and jargon understandable only to 
top-level engineers. 2. Reveal no information about our product.  

   91Jul01 7:17 pm from colin campbell
   We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee.  
   That reminds me, one of my brothers lived in Muskogee, Oklahoma, USA for ten 
years. He hated that song. He was an inmate of the Oklahoma State Home for the 
Blind there.  
   My little brother is 38 now, still blind, still crippled. Five years ago his 
twin sister was married here in Santa Barbara and he was here for the wedding. 
He played the organ at the wedding, in fact. A musical whiz.  
   He attended the bachelor party for the groom at my apartment the night before 
the wedding. Somebody hired a stripper to put on an act for the groom, and my 
brother was really excited about it. He's 38 and still a virgin and likely to 
remain that way, and if you ever got a look at him you'd understand 
why. Terrible birth defects. 
   He knew what was going on, he's not stupid, just crippled. As the bachelor 
party progressed he talked to the stripper girl a few times and finally she 
said "Well what do you really want?" and my brother wasn't able to say it, but 
he went to my computer and typed out that he'd always wanted to sit in the lap 
of a naked girl.  
   Sounds backward to me, but the girl promptly sat down in my typing chair and 
sat him on her lap. She grabbed his hands and put them on her breasts. He 
resisted maniacally, and everybody laughed. 
   Now every time I talk to my brother he asks about Debbie.I finally wrote him 
a letter in Braille and told him about the accident in which she fell off the 
hood of a speeding truck and landed on her head, and now is in a persistent 
vegetative state in a nursing home.  

   91Jul01 7:39 pm from colin campbell
   If there hasn't been a study of  Playboy bunnies, I volunteer to do it.  
   My life was heavily influenced by Playboy magazine starting in the early 60s. 
Sure, I liked the photos of bare-boobed babes, but I also liked the subversive 
content. I bought Hefner's ideas about sexual freom, political freedom, 
technological freedom. I learned about Lenny Bruce from Playboy.  
  In 1967 my father asked me if I'd written anything lately, and I said yes, 
I'd just submitted a short story to Playboy. "Why do you kids like Playboy?" 
he said, perplexed. "Let me show you how easy Playboy is." He went to the 
phone and called his agent and said, "I want to get some work from Playboy 
magazine, Okay?"  
   In a few weeks I got my story back from Playboy, rejected, but my father got 
the job of designing the logo for the PLAYBOY'S GIFTS FOR DADS AND GRADS section 
in the June 1968 issue.  
   I liked Playboy through the 70s but in the 80s it started seeming really 
lame. When Santa Barbara girl Kym Herrin was the March 1981 centerfold, I had 
her sign it for me and asked her a bunch of questions at a bookstore promotion 
(only to have all my questions and her answers printed in a subsequent 
NewsPress story by a reporter too shy to ask anything himself) and my 
illusions were shattered; she had the tiniest little-girl voice and I never take 
any woman seriously who talked like that.  
   Then her sister kept getting into trouble with the law for drugs, and I saw 
the book by longtime Playboy yeoman Micki Garcia, who uncovered the pressures 
and prerequisites of Playmatehood...Bobbie what's-her-name suicided rather 
than implicate Hefner's cocaine connections... 
   I kept reading Playboy for their top-notch journalism a few more years into 
the 80s, but now it just seems tired and old.  
   The funny thing is that my youngest sister's first job in Hollywood was with 
Playboy; she was a prodution assistant on Playmate Video shoots, and spent 5 
nights a week in comedy clubs scouting talent for the Playboy Channel.  

   91Jul02 9:47 am from Mirror Man
Colin, I have to ask. Is this really all your life that you tell us about? 

   91Jul02 10:34 am from colin campbell
   No, it's not all. There's a lot more I've never mentioned yet.  

   91Jul02 2:10 pm from Mirror Man
Funny, well we have some time, so shoot. 

   91Jul02 6:45 pm from colin campbell
   I acquired literacy very early--I was reading on a high-school level by the 
time I was in 2nd grade. My home life was horrendous and in trying to deal 
with it I wrote a letter to Ann Landers explaining my circumstances. I never 
mailed the letter: simply writing down my situation helped me deal with it. I 
started writing everything down.  
   I've been a compulsive scribbler ever since. Sometimes I'm afraid it is 
nothing more than grapholalia.  
   Swagman, please fix this fucking line noise, will you?  
   My photo collection of BBS nerds is growing. I'm up to 17 pictures now. 
Today I got some new software, PhotoShop, and I took the picture of Swagman 
and copied one of his eyes and pasted it into his forehead. It looked so 
natural that I did it to Bob Blaylock, too.

   91Jul08 8:35 pm from colin
   Rodney King should get a job as spokesman for Hyundai. "Yep, me and my 
three dudes was jammin on the freeway," he says, and the camera shifts to show 
the three fatboy passengers smiling at the camera, "and I was jes feelin so 
full of the American petroleum power, and I put my foot into it, I confess. 
Within moments we were doing 110 miles per hour. I wasn't in my right mind, I 
confess. But who in their right mind would buy a Hyundai?" (Big slow wink, 
then camera switches to long shot of car racing away, pursued by California 
Highway Patrol car.) (Voice over: "110 miles per hour is official estimate of 
California Highway Patrol. Your speed may vary. Remember that high speed is 
illegal and dangerous." 

   91Jul16 8:26 pm from colin campbell
   They didn't even have a bong team when I was attending Eastern Michigan 
University. Later I met some members of the University of Michigan team, 
though. Boy did they bong.  
   I saw a couple people descend into heroin addiction at that time. One guy 
was a motorcyclist and he came down with a severe case of road rash, and the 
doctors gave him morphine, but after a few months the pain was still severe 
and the doctors wouldn't give him any more prescriptions, so he started 
chipping heroin. We were such an intellectual crew that we knew we were able 
to self-medicate ourselves.  
   That was the only time I tried heroin, the evening that this guy explained 
his situation to me. Say, come to think of it, we were playing Scrabble that 
night. I don't remember the game itself--another routine victory--what I 
remember is my wife turning her tile-holder toward me to show the non-valid 
word she was able to make with her letters: CUNTFED. It was a double joke 
because she worked for the IRS as a Federal Revenue Agent. Then our friend 
Jill  saw my wife's tile-holder, and she double-taked at it, reached for her 
own tile-holder and rearranged the letters, then faced them around toward us: 
CUNTFAD, it said.  
   Later that evening I snorted some heroin just to try it out. It made me puke 
hard, and then lie in the corner like a lump. Scrabble is a lot more 
interesting than heroin.  

   91Jul17 6:19 pm from colin campbell
   My career is a history of turning down salaries. I prefer poverty in Santa 
Barbara to high-stress riches in the big city. I opted out of the big-time ad 
biz 12 years ago, and my brother stayed in it. Today he makes about $80,000 a 
year; I was one notch ahead of him when I left, so I'd probably be making 
$100,000 today if I'd stayed.  
   Instead, I'm here, and I don't have any gray hair yet. I spend my days 
bicycling on the beach path, going to the library, playing softball in the 
park, yakking on the BBS.  

   91Jul17 6:28 pm from colin campbell
   I avoid watching movies at the theater. I let the movies come to me on the 
tube. It's not because of the cost, though. My disinfatuation with movies 
started when I first opened an office in the Granada building, and discovered 
that my keys to the building could get me into the theater any time I wanted. 
 
   To my surprise, I discovered that I could not enjoy most movies without 
paying for them. When I pay money to see a movie, I'm grimly determined to see 
the whole thing, to get my money's worth. When I started seeing movies free, I 
began walking out on them more and more.  
   Also, I am a speed reader and I always want to fast-forward movies. Most 
movies don't make any sense--they are spectacles, not stories, cartoons, not 
real happenings. 

   91Jul17 4:51 pm from HOOKLA
I don't know.. I never liked the idea of not being in control of my body.  The 
thought of waking up one morning and finding corpses of the people you 
brutally attered with a baseball bat doesn't really appeal to me. 

   91Jul17 6:39 pm from colin campbell
   That's never happened to me, even though I've had lots of drugs. The 
nearest thing to that was one time when I had this girl at my apartment, and 
we drank and drank, and the next day I woke up and there was no sign of her 
and I wondered if I'd put her body in the trunk or something. I hate hangovers  like that.  
   I smoked opium a couple of times but I didn't like it. I did'nt like opiates 
in general, nor barbiturates. What fun is there in snoozing out and/or puking? 
Same with Rohrer 714, qualudes. I took one once and then suddenly woke up the 
next morning and wondered what happened. My brother was addicted to Valium for 
a while, but that was the blankest thing to me...I took a few Valium but never 
noticed any effect.  
   When I was 30 I was smoking tobacco very heavy and drinking quarts of Jim 
Beam and I had chest pains and went to a clinic, and the doctor examined me 
perfunctorily, then hauled out his prescription pad and sighed, "How many 
Valium do you want?" 
   I didn't need any more addictions, so I went home and quit smoking. What a 
relief.  

   91Jul18 11:15 am from colin campbell
   I smoked continuously--four packs a day. I was not at all a courteous 
smoker. I quit very reluctantly...I enjoyed being a smoker. But it was killing 
me.  
   Another reason I didn't want to quit: I was a smokin' writer. You could 
determine my progress on a manuscript by the number of finished cigarettes in 
the ashtray.  I was so accustomed to smoking while I was writing...I was 
afraid that I wouldn't be able to write if I didn't have a cigarette 
going. 
    Pretty silly. At that time I'd published two or three little 
pieces--nothing, essentially. 99% of my output has been as a non-smoker.  
    Except for that other weed, of course.

   91Jul18 6:11 pm from colin campbell
   I hate interviewing because I sweat like a pig and I get these huge 
semicircles of sweat on my shirt. One time I was interviewing a UCSB 
researcher and he suddenly stopped answering my questions and said "Why are 
you sweating so much?"  
   "This is work," I told him. He scoffed. So I left him out of the article, 
hah. He was a strange guy anyway. He was researching humor; his method was to 
shove tubes down subject's throats and insert a balloon into their stomachs 
and fill the balloon with ice water, hook electrodes to the subject's body, 
then show funny movies to the subjects. Ha ha. His subject was humor, and so I 
asked him "What's your favorite joke?" and he became very angry at my flippant 
attitude.  

   91Jul23 11:02 am from colin campbell
   I've never worried much about being hit elsewhere. Being hit in the head is 
my main fear. My college ball career ended when a low line drive hit a rock in 
the infield and sproinged up into my right eyeball. It knocked me out and the 
next thing I knew I was being carried by  six teammates to the campus 
hospital, face down, blood spurting out of my face onto the turf. Yikes. The 
docs managed to stitch my cornea together and the long term result was no 
troubles. But ever since, I've been "Mr. Flinch" when playing 3rd base.  
   Each guy has his own fear. I played on one team with a 3rd baseman who was a 
terrible glove man, but a very good third baseman: his method was to let the 
ball hit him on the chest and fall to the ground, and then he'd pick it up and 
throw the batter out. He was completely terrified of getting hit on the shin, 
however. The shortstop on my present softball team is obsessed with the possibility 
he's going to be hit in the nuts. I never worry about that--I have a protective cup, 
but I never wear it.  
   If I could wear a catcher's mask, I'd be a brilliant 3rd baseman.

   91Jul24 10:45 am from colin campbell
   My nose was cut off when I was 10. Ouch. Thank god for plastic surgery. My 
mother's biker boyfriends were pissed off because I was such a pedantic 
smartass, and to teach me a lesson they jimmied with my pogo stick, and the 
next time I jumped on it, the footpegs went straight to the ground and the top 
of the pogo stick slammed into my face and cut off my nose. The bikers rolled 
around laughing on the porch--they thought I just had a bloody nose. I went in 
the house and my mother held a cloth to my nose, and when she pulled the cloth 
away, the nose came with it.  

   91Jul25 8:39 pm from colin campbell
   People never told me to look things up when I was a kid. It was the other 
way around: they'd tell me something, and I'd be dubious and go look it up, 
and find out they were wrong. Then I'd go back and tell them. It didn't make 
me popular.  

   91Jul25 8:49 pm from colin campbell
   In the mid-70s I had a girlfriend in Hillsdale, Michigan, home of a 
celebrated battle over government funding. Hillsdale College was one of the 
last places to spurn Federal funding, and thus was able to thumb its nose at 
then-current equivalents to PCism. In the papers it sounded like a brave 
struggle against Central Planning, but as I spent more time on the campus it 
became clear the school was a refuge for rich white dunces majoring in tennis. 
 
   91Aug22 6:56 pm from colin
   The chickens on our farm were almost exclusively white leghorns, although 
we had a few Rhode Island reds and bantys. The reason was that two weeks after 
every Easter, our road way out in farm country became clogged with familys 
tossing big, messy two-week-old chickens over the fence into our front yard. 
 
   Also, on Easter Sunday night you could buy left-over sweet baby chicks at 
the dime store for a penny each (instead of the retail dollar). Or a dime a 
dozen. Or, okay, a baker's dozen.  
   99% of the dimestore chickens were roosters, because the female chicks were 
held back from Easter sale. The life of a chicken sexer: the eggs keep 
hatching, and new chicks pop onto the conveyor belt, and as the chicks pass by 
you pick each one up by the beak and watch how it struggles. If it just hangs 
there, it's a girl, and goes into Box A. If it flaps and kicks and whuffles 
about, it's a boy, and goes in Box B.  
   A chick hatched for Easter is frying high by the 4th of July, and it was 
ghastly the way we slaughtered those Easter chicks for Independence Day. Us 
kids would fight and scrabble to change jobs--was it worse to have to kill all 
the chickens, or to gut and pluck them? I never chopped a bird's head off with 
an axe--sounds risky to me. We grabbed them by the neck and cracked them like 
a whip. The dogs and the cats all hung out at the sidelines and watched us 
eagerly as we killed.  
   We had a big cauldron, a 55-gallon drum in a pit, and we'd tumble firewood 
into the pit all day and keep the water boiling so we could toss a dead 
chicken in for five minutes, then fish it out and pluck it. A poached bird 
plucks easier. Lots easier.  
   The few Leghorn hens were our egg birds. They had no thought for their eggs, 
they squatted and laid their eggs whenever the urge struck. The Rhode Island 
reds and the bantys were secretive about their egg-laying and highly 
protective of the chicks they hatched out.  
   But I am, of course, completely ignorant about these animals.  

   91Aug23 11:18 am from GurgleKat
If it causes you to type in interesting stories like that, Colin, I'll call 
you ignorant any day of the week. :-) 

   91Aug23 11:30 am from Diablo
ditto. 

  91Sep21 12:16 am from colin campbell
   I never was much for fishing.  There was a pond nearby my boyhood haunts 
and I could rowboat over the middle and see 24-inch fish on the bottom, but 
they ignored my hooks. Disdained them. The junior fish would bite a hook but 
they tasted just like the stupid pond, so I threw them back rather than eat 
them. My brother was the better fisherman: he used a bow and arrow rather than 
a hook. He stalked the swamps and occasionally caught a big pike in the 
narrows, and he'd drill the fish with an arrow with thirty feet of string  
attached. He kept bringing home these fish big as a man's arm... 

   91Sep24 7:25 pm from colin campbell
   Rebounds are gimmes. In the old days I'd go to the bar and start talking to 
some girl and she'd start gassing off about her ex-boyfriend, and I'd know 
that I had her, if I wanted. But after a while it got tedious because they 
weren't coming with me because they liked me, but because they wanted to 
punish their ex.  
   Still, some of those rebounds are hard to turn down. When I was 22 I was 
working as a writer and layout man for the central Sears ad agency, and they 
brought in a new artist one day, a 25-year-old blonde who was married to the 
Congressman. Boy was she built. She was a pretty good natural artist but she 
didn't realize what was needed for retail ads, and we ended up going to lunch 
a lot.  
   But it was all just job stuff, I was dating a different girl in the ad 
department who I later married. Then one day the blonde was all in a boil in 
the office, and she told me that it was because the congressman had promised 
they'd have this weekend and now he'd cancelled.  
   I had tickets to a Jimi Hendrix concert that night (he was still alive then) 
and I suggested that we go there. She said yes, and when I went to her 
apartment we talked and touched and then didn't go to the concert...

   91Oct04 8:02 pm from colin campbell
   I don't enter the discussions about religion.  For one thing, I don't know 
anything about it. In previous eras, religious studies were the only way for 
the unwashed to gain gold (except for military studies) and plenty of 
high-powered intellects have explored all theoretical aspects of religion. I 
can't compete against those guys.  
   Not being a student of religion, and not being a member of any religion, I 
have little to say about it, except for my subjective experience as a victim 
of oppressive small-town religion. In my experience, religion is a meme that 
gives solace to its believers mainly by exclusion--everybody else in the world 
who doesn't believe in your religion is doomed, but you are not, even if you 
are on the bottom in every measurable aspect.  
   Whenever I went to church when I was a kid, the preacher took notice of me 
and whoever else of my family was present, and spoke of us in his sermon to 
remind the congregation that he thought my mother was a whore, and that my 
youngest siblings' birth defects were heavenly retribution for my mother's 
lifestyle.  

   91Oct18 8:15 pm from colin campbell
   "Assault weapon" is a propaganda term. To assault is to attack. A weapon is 
something with which to attack.  How come we never hear much about assault 
knives? Those goddam assault knives, did you know you can theoretically kill 
as many as a thousand people without reloading?  

   91Oct22 7:44 pm from colin campbell
   I was part of a Chrysler Corporation program to name a new car in 1979. 
They were going to market a little two-seater sports car powered by a hot new 
3-valve engine from Mitsubishi, and they wanted a perfect name for it. I 
worked for an ad agency, BBDO, that was assigned to develop the name.  
   First the agency sent us writers a memo about it, along with an information 
kit about what the new car would be like. Then we all went to the Chrysler 
Building and their executives explained what the mission of the name would be. 
They had big charts with single words on them, and they'd flip through the 
charts during their indoctrination. "POWER. The new name must encompass and 
delineate the extraordinary new horsepower and acceleration this car 
possesses." 
   Then they asked each of us to submit 10 names for the new car. I threw 
myself into the project and put great skull sweat into it, and came up with a 
list that I was sure contained the name that would be picked. But a week went 
by, and the memo came asking us for another dozen names. I had no feedback as 
to whether any of my previous submissions were close to the mark or wildly 
off.      
    Still, I threw myself into it once again and made another good list.  
   The next week they asked for another dozen names. I lost interest. I 
submitted a list of President's names, names of Indian chiefs, names of 
powerful mammalian carnivores.  
    They asked for another dozen, and by this time I was annoyed. I submitted a 
list of in-your-face names. "The new Dodge Manatee!"   "The new Dodge Smegma!" 
"The new Dodge Labia Minora!"  
    I'd still heard no response from anybody. The next week we were asked to 
submit another dozen potential new names, and so I bought a cheap paperback 
dictionary and submitted it with a note saying which pages my submissions were 
on, but I didn't pick any words.  
    A month later we had a big meeting in which 30 people sat at the huge onyx 
conference table and spouted words aloud, while beautiful young women standing 
at chalkboards at every wall wrote down our golden brainstorming. Set aside 
your preconceptions and your intellect and connect to your primal vocabulary, 
or something. Shout it out.  
     Then the car was actually announced by the Chrysler braintrust, and its 
name was (drum roll, please,): 
      O 24. 

   11Nov91 10:26pm from Colin Campbell
   I have this girlfriend with big tits, and the way I get computer equipment
is to go into the computer store with her and she goes to the back and takes
her glasses and her t-shirt off and then gropes around asking the computer
nerds to help her find her glasses and her t-shirt, and they all look for the
glasses first, and it's simple to walk out with serious computers at that
moment. 	

   91Nov22 11:00 am from Colin Campbell
   I was standing in front of my 12th grade English class dazed with fear 
because I was supposed to deliver a 5-minute oral report about King Lear and I 
hadn't read the play yet and I had no idea what I was going to say, it was 
going to be the most embarrassing event of my school history, and then St. 
John Kennedy sacrificed his life so that the teacher would say, after the 
announcement came through the school's speakers, "Sit down, Colin." Whew! 
   I couldn't quit grinning the rest of the day.  

   92Jan07 6:46 pm from Colin Campbell
  I had a friend who was having dinner at a restaurant and suddenly a robber 
came in and fired a shot into the ceiling to grab everybody's attention and 
took the money from the cash register and then went from table to table taking 
everybody's wallet and jewelry, but when he got to Jim's table, Jim suddenly 
lunged up and slugged him and wrestled him to the floor.  
   The next morning it was in all the local newspapers how he'd bravely 
thwarted the robbery and people started calling him, but he had a big hangover 
and he had no memory of the event. He said it was the scariest thing that ever 
happened to him: reading about his heroism in the papers. He'd been drinking 
all day and didn't even remember going to that restaurant, let alone slugging 
the robber.  

   92Jan08 7:49 pm from Colin Campbell
   For the new year I'm going to start smoking and drinking again, and gain 40 
pounds, and sit around all day watching TV instead of bicycling and playing 
softball.  

   92Feb03 8:29 pm from Colin Campbell
   Sounds normal to me. When I was 23 I moved to California with my new wife 
and we landed in Orange County, and we went to work for a weekly tabloid, 
"Orange County Nite Life." It was fun work but it didn't pay much, and my wife 
and I had night jobs besides the magazine work--I edited and proofed repair 
manuals for Navy jet aircraft on the night shift, and Rhonda worked as a 
bikini waitress at a biker bar.  
   One night we had a rare day off together, and we cooked a fancy candle 
light dinner together, and then the phone rang and it was the biker bar and 
would Rhonda work tonight's shift? No, we said, and they offered double pay 
and we said no, and then they said $100, which was heavy cash back then, about 
two weeks pay at minimum wage for one 4-hour shift.  
   It turned out that the on-duty barmaid had been attacked by a former 
boyfriend who gouged her with a meathook. Rhonda was such a cuss, it looked 
like she was hoping another guy with a meat hook was coming in so she could 
demonstrate how to handle a guy like that without getting hurt.  
   Harmony would understand it, I'm sure. By becoming one with your attacker 
you are ensured that his emotional reactions will be one with your own, and by 
understanding his urges and motivations you become certain of what he will do 
if you pull a .45 out and aim it between his eyes.  

   92Feb20 6:04 pm from Colin Campbell
    Are girls with silicon tits cyborgs?  

   92Mar02 6:32 pm from Colin Campbell
   I don't even know what a sexist is any more. A person who believes there is 
any slight difference between a man and a woman? Researchers are showing that 
male and female brain structures are different. Is it sexist to acknowledge 
that men are physically stronger, pound for pound, than women?  
   Yesterday I played coed softball, and the batter before me laced a line 
drive through the middle of the diamond, barely missing the pitcher, who was a 
girl. She was shaken up by the near miss and asked me not to do the same 
thing. Sure, I said, and on the first pitch I blasted the ball directly at her 
head and she fell back and away barely in time, then lay on the mound drumming 
her heels on the ground and shrieking. I didn't TRY to hit it at her, I was 
trying to hit to right field, but basically I was playing the game without 
regard to the sex of the pitcher. I suppose that's sexist.  

   92Mar02 7:04 pm from Colin Campbell
   My neighbor across the street had an Aussie shepherd that roamed at will 
and after a few years the City sent somebody to tell my neighbor to fence the 
dog in or suffer. John built a fence and the dog wiggled through it to roam, 
he built the fence higher and thicker and the dog still escaped. Finally John 
told me he was baffled and in despair because the City was going to fine him 
and the dog penetrated every barrier John could build. I told him to take the 
dog aside and explain very clearly that John didn't WANT the dog to cross the 
fence line. Do it in English, explain it in body language, pantomime it, 
whatever way possible, but discuss it with the dog, because the dog probably 
thought John was building the wall higher as a playful challenge.  
   When you have a rapport with your dog you can scratch a line in the dirt 
with a stick and tell the dog not to cross it.

   92Mar05 2:24 am from Colin Campbell
   Starting to come down from the acid now. My world is swiftly unraveling out 
from under  me, I'm beset by storms on all sides, so naturally today when I was 
down to my last five dollars I went to Wayne's house and bought two hits of acid 
for $4.  I saved my last dollar for coffee and a Chronicle in the morning.  
   I like to do acid every now and again to get perspective on myself. Stand 
outside my body and look at myself as a churning mixture of electrons and 
voltages in contention against other self-defined, self-edged entities.  
   Today I got Aldus magazine in the mail and I kept studying the ads for 
sublimal dye printers. Retail price, $10,999. Drive 'er right off the lot, 
buddy. Boy, couldn't I make color baseball cards for local softball teams with 
that baby. My birthday is less than a year away, maybe I could ask my dad to 
buy me one. 
   
   I just don't know what to do. I look out my office window and see hordes of 
homeless, and the only difference between me and them is chance. I've got 
$20,000 worth of Macintosh equipment but I can't seem to make it do anything. 
Today I completed Highway 101 Newsletter #147 for Mike Mortenson of Caltrans.  
He's the director of all the new freeway construction here in Santa Barbara.  
I'm doing it for free because I'm trying to get noticed. Governor Wilson made 
Mortenson stop publication of the newsletter after issue #143 because it was  
too controversial. I get a free ad in each issue, that's my pay. Plus after 
last issue Mike gave me a 1956 Topps baseball card #20, Al Kaline. Probably 
alone of all United States males of the baby boom generation, Mike's mom 
didn't  throw out his baseball card collection. She called him few weeks ago 
and said she'd found it while rummaging in the basement. his collection is 
worth about $15,000, according to the baseball card books.  
   
   Yesterday I went to the office without a nickel in my pockets, I didn't 
know what I was going to do. A woman came in and said she needed a flyer for a 
homeless demonstration, some poor girl named Mickey gave birth at midnight 
last Saturday and at 2am county authorities took the baby away from her. I 
wasn't sure what the issues involved were but I made a flyer and the woman 
gave me $3.83, and I was able to have coffee and a sandwich. Then a guy from 
my building wanted a fast flyer to insert in his newsletter. He runs a bad 
black boy intervention operation. Took me 5 minutes, I charged him five bucks. 
  
    I'm so far behind in my office rent. I can't find any clients. My office 
building was on the local news tonight--the Granada Theater is going to become 
a legitimate stage theater; they'll still show movies upstairs, but the main 
theater will start showing stage productions that used to be at the Lobero 
Theater. This will necessitate umpty jillion dollars worth of hammering and 
sawing which supposedly will be finished by late August.  
   
    My camera vanished from my office last week, an Olympus XA. I took about 
5000 pictures with it over the last dozen years. Tuesday my neighbor came into 
his office in the morning and realized that his 5-gallon Arrowhead water jug 
full of coins was gone. We made police reports...a woman on the 4th floor 
reported grappling with an intruder the day before.  
   
    I don't know what to do. I've spent the evening tossing and manipulating a 
softball, catching it in my $120 Rawlings RSG5PRO glove with Edge-U-Cated 
Heel. I swung my baseball bat and assumed manly postures with it.  
  
    I don't know what a man is supposed to do in this universe. My father and 
uncles were all combat veterans of World War II and I grew up expecting to 
have to survive on my ability to shoot a gun. I practiced and practiced and 
thank god I never had to enter combat myself. Yet. Thousands of pop bottles 
and beer cans gave their lives so that Colin could become an expert marksman, 
but today that means nothing.  
  
   Softball is my pseudo combat, I guess. Frankly, it about scares the poop 
out of me to stand 40 feet away from some muscular giant with a club who's 
sole intention is to hit a rock-hard ball 130 miles per hour right at my head. 
But after I've survived the event I feel good about it.  

   92Mar14 4:31 pm from Colin Campbell
   I had a chance for a 3-way one time. I was at this girl's apartment on 
Milpas street and she let her two big boa constrictors out of their cages and 
they writhed around on the floor and two kittens dashed in and batted at the 
snakes. Then one of the snakes crawled up my leg and I had to take my pants 
off to get the snake off. Then somehow the girl and I ended up in the sack. I 
made her take the safety pins out of her nose, they were too distracting. 
Today you wouldn't think a girl with a pierced nose was unusual, but this was 
in 1973.  
   Then I heard a door open and she said "Oh, it must be my roommate. Colin, 
please fuck her, she never gets any." But then the roommate turned out to be 
really fat and ugly. She stripped and climbed in to bed with us but I was 
repelled by her and went limp.  Then both girls jeered and ridiculed me and I 
meekly put on my pants and fled.  
   Life isn't always like the porn books. 

   24Mar92 from Colin Campbell
   I reached puberty about 1 year later than my classmates, as far as I could
tell, but I think it was mostly due to dietary deficiency--my mother never felt
it was her job to provide food, and I was a very hungry kid in my junior high
days. After we moved to the farm there was more food around--you could go
outside with a gun and shoot something and eat it, and I did, and I fed my
brothers and sisters and they seemed to hit puberty at the normal age. 
    My mother was mostly interested in interfering with my development, not my
8 younger brothers and sisters. Like all first-borns, I was supposed to
discover the cure for cancer, become an astronaut, be elected president, hit 63
home runs in a season, and win the Nobel Prize. When it became clear I was not
on that track, Mom lost interest in the rest of the kids and devoted her life
to screwing motorcycle thugs.	

   25Mar92 21:10 from colin campbell
   Archaeologists found a cuniform tablet with a recipe for beer a while ago,
and somebody went ahead and followed the recipe. It turned out to be pretty
tasty, they said, after you got used to it. It was non-carbonated, of course,a
and one of the ingredients was raisins, so it had a fruitier taste than modern
beers. But it was beer, they confirmed. 
   Me, I'll drink any horse piss they put in front of me. 

   92Apr01 8:45 pm from Colin Campbell
   Misha and Reid and Darby are turning 23 this year, in fact only Misha has 
not yet turned that corner, and it has made me think about my own 23rd year. 
Things are sure different now.  
   My girlfriend Rhonda and I were working at an ad agency that put out 300 
ads a week for all the Sears stores in the midwest. A big flu epidemic went 
through the agency and I was the only person who didn't get it. At the peak of 
the Xmas rush I was writing and producing 200 full-page newspaper ads a week 
all by myself. After the first of the year things returned to normal, and then 
the boss called me into the office for the annual salary review. I said I 
thought I deserved a raise, and the boss said "I've been expecting this, 
Colin," and he hauled out a sheaf of time cards. "You've been late an average 
of 3.5 minutes EVERY DAY since you joined us," he said.  
    I started to say something and he said, "Stop,let's go to a private 
area,"  and then he gave me the most scathing verbal demolishment I've ever 
suffered in my life. I dressed wrong, I thought the wrong thoughts, I was the 
most scummiest person he had ever seen, I hung out with the wrong friends. By 
the end of the interview I was a quivering mass of 23-year-old jelly. But then 
as he said goodbye he said "We have hopes of redeeming you, Colin," and he 
told me that he'd authorized the company to increase my pay by five cents an 
hour. 
  It was a Friday and I thought about it all weekend and first thing on 
Monday morning I gave him two weeks notice of intent to quit. He was taken 
aback. "That's not what I wanted," he said , and I said "That's what you got."  
    At my going-away luncheon two weeks later, I decided I wouldn't go back to 
the office after lunch, and six other people (in a 27-person office) decided 
they'd not go  back, either, and quit on the spot. What a thing to put on your 
references list.  
   
     Oh well, this is going on too long. Rhonda and I joined a nudist commune 
in Michigan, but by the end of summer it was getting cold, so we moved to 
California. I found a job editing US Navy jet aircraft repair manuals, and 
Rhonda was a bikini dancer at local beer bars, and we also were editor & 
publisher of Orange County Night Life Magazine, a freebie newspaper telling 
you where the cool bands were playing.  
     But then we turned 24 and it was all over.  

   11Apr92 21:02 from colin campbell
    Tonight I had one beer at my sister's house, a Coor's Light, and then two
glasses of pink wine that came out of a box. On the way home I bought a half
pint of vodka, and now I've taken a hit of acid. 
    Americans today are not into quality, but quantity. American beers are made
not for richness of taste but for speed back into the city plumbing system. One
can argue whether it is better to adhere to the European model or the US peein'
model, but it's all just beer. Europeans need stronger, better beers because
they didn't have the strong, plentiful American diet. Beer was food in Europe.

   18Apr92 by Colin Campbell
   The only time I did heroin was because this guy I knew had some. He was in a
motorcycle accident and had major road rash, and in the hospital they gave him
plenty of morphine but after he got out they wouldn't give him any more and so
he started buying heroin on the street, and he got totally hooked. I was
visiting him at the University of Michigan one time and I snorted some heroin,
just to try it. After I got done puking all I could do was just lie in the
corner. What a dumb drug, I thought. It was just like morphine that I had after
a bad accident when I was 12, and after another one when I was 18. Gave me
flashbacks of lying on a gurney in a hospital corridor, numb and bleeding. Ick.

   Later I had some roommates who were needle junkies, they liked to "run"
cocaine and heroin. That's they way they liked to take their LSD, too, and they
were always urging me to try it. No way. I hate needles too much, for one
thing.  I moved out, and a couple months later they found one of the roommates
dead on the couch with a needle in his arm. What a moron. He was an only child
and his mother kept me on her Christmas card list for years afterward and would
call me and weep about him. I hardly knew him but I was the only link the woman
had to the kid, I guess. 

   92May06 9:21 pm from Colin Campbell
   I do 50 reps of 5 different arm exercises with 3-pound weights every night 
while I watch the local news. I bicycle 35 miles a week on flat terrain (I 
hate and avoid hills). I play softball two hours a day, three times a week.  
   But mainly, when the scale says my weight is over 160, I stop eating until 
it's back under 160. Probably not a scientific diet, but it works.  
   I used to do a lot of handstands and walk around on my hands. I'd go into 
bars and have a couple beers and feign drunkeness and start bragging about my 
prowess as a walker on my hands, and bet that I could walk on my hands 25 feet 
to the door and then back to my table. I had a pal who talked up the crowd to 
get into the betting. Sometimes we'd have fifty or sixty bucks on the table.  
   I always cautioned the crowd that I needed to have the right to have three 
attempts at the feat. Then I excused myself to take a piss before the attempt, 
and I'd stumble into a table or fall up the stairs or something to pretend to be drunk.  
    Then I came back and simply stood up on my hands and walked straight to 
the door and back to the table just as quickly as you could do it on your own  
two feet, because I'd practiced it for years.  
    People never got mad about us winning the bet, either, because it was a 
fun event. They were too astonished to protest, and nobody was out more than 
one or two bucks.
    But in my late 30s my shoulders started to ache and ache and ache and I 
gave up standing on my hands, and my shoulders quit aching. I think it was a sign.  

   11May92 22:15 from colin campbell
    I grew up in Detroit, and I'd be in a downtown restaurant in a booth next
to a booth full of cops, and all they'd talk about would be the number of jigs
they'd gunned down. Laughing and joking and telling how the dude's eyes got
bigger and bigger as the cop put the gun closer and closer to his nose, the the
surprised jolt when they hear and feel the bullet hit. haw, haw haw. If anybody
complained about one of these killings, the cops said the decedent was a
suspected numbers runner for The Mob. Today the State runs the numbers racket
so the cops say the dead nig is a suspected gang-involved youth. 

   12May92 22:45 from colin campbell
    Wyvern, I'll bet you're right. My beliefs about the existence of God etc.
crystallized when I was in my early teens, and nothing in the ensuing 30 years
has given me the slightest reason to change my beliefs. 
    I knew lots of Catholic kids when I was young.  I felt great sympathy for
them because they were so rigidly controlled by their religion. My own family
worshiped the Great God Gin, and so I was able to pick and choose among other
religions. When I became a devourer of literature I found myself drawn to
Jewish writers. I think it was because of the reverence for learning which
seemes to be transmitted in the Jewish lore. When I discussed learning with my
drunken Irish family they said "ah fukka dat kynda buul shat," but in the
stories I read the characters engaged in all kind of invigorating conversation.
     Anyway. My point is that firm decisions early in life really do carry on
for lifetimes. 

   92May12 8:51 pm from colin campbell
 I say that every county in California should secede and put up barricades on
all borders and charge tolls to pass through. Require visitors to state their
business at the border and to purchase daily visas for each day of their stay,
and to report their location to the police twice a day. And anybody from
outside the county who is caught outside after dark can be painted green and
beaten to death for fun by any legitimate County resident, because if they
ain't from our County, they ain't human.

   92May17 9:05 pm from colin campbell
 I allowed the cops to search my trunk one time. I was 19, and I was living in
my car. I parked in the woods to keep away from the cops, but one night there
was a tap on my window and it was the the police. I'd been thinking about
suicide and there was a pistol on the floor in the front seat, but I didn't
think about that, I rolled down the window when I saw the cop. "Yessir," I
said. They were rural cops and not on guard like LA cops would be today. They
asked me what I was doing and I started explaining about my home situation and
I had a job at the aluminum window stamping plant and the other cop swept his
flashlight around the interior of my car ( a 1963 Buick Special) and then
froze on my pistol.
   They told me to get out of the car and one cop grabbed the pistol. But I
explained that it was a replica 1848 Colt Navy black powder pistol that was
outside of all current firearms laws, and I was right. It was like having an
old car that predates today's smog laws.
   Then the cop said "Do you have any other firearms in this car?" I never lie
to cops so I said "Yes."  This made the cops nervous and they ordered me to
give them the keys and they opened the trunk, where I had a semi-automatic .22
rifle with a scope and a 20-round magazine, a .410 gauge single-shot shotgun,
a .35 caliber Marlin deer rifle, and an antique single-shot falling-block .22.
   The cops looked at the guns lying loose in the trunk, then said "You should
take better care of these guns, kid, get some cases for them, put some oil on
them, they're getting all rusty."
   Boy, does it pay to be white.

   92Jun11 12:58 am from Colin Campbell
   My longest bout of insomnia was when I was waiting to take my physical exam 
to determine if I were suitable for induction into the US Army during the 
VietNam war. I got out of bed at 8am on a Friday morning and worried about the 
Monday physical--if the Army wanted, on Monday they could whisk me away to 
training camp and then right into the war.  
   But I had a job managing a liquor store and I opened at 830am and ran the 
place until midnight, and then went to a poker game at somebody's house and 
played cards until 8am in the morning, and went back to the liquor store and 
opened up, and ran it until midnight Saturday, and then played poker until 9am 
( the store didn't open until 10 on Sundays) and then ran the store until 10 
o'clock Sunday night and went home. I was starting to get tired. I was 19 
years old and I didn't drink alcohol or coffee, I didn't smoke cigarettes nor 
anything else. What a pure knight I was. I didn't even swear.  
   But after being awake 72 hours I was worried about going to sleep: what if 
I didn't wake up in time to be at the draft board at 6am?  So I ducked into my 
mother's bathroom and slipped out three dexedrine tablets from her diet 
cabinet and took them and stayed up all night reading Ace Double Science Fiction Novels.  
   I never went to sleep, and then at 6am I went to the draft board and they 
bussed us to Fort Something and they poked and prodded me all day but I had 
letters from doctors swearing that I had serious physical bonks, and in the 
end they rejected me, about 7pm on Monday evening, long after the bus had 
taken everybody else home. They offered to let me stay overnight at the Fort 
but I paid for a bus ride home out of my own pocket, and I got home just about 
dawn on Tuesday. I was signed up to register at Eastern Michigan University 
that day, except I'd been sure I would be in the Army by then so I hadn't paid 
much attention. So I had to fling clothes in a suitcase and pile into my 1948 
Ford pickup truck and motor off to Ypsilanti, Michigan. I got there in time to 
register for my classes and to be assigned a dorm room and move in, and then 
my new dorm mates and I stayed up until 5 in the morning yakking about our new 
situation. And then I finally went to bed.  

   26Jun92 by Colin Campbell
    I love doing acid with rats. They fry so hard that they go cross-eyed just
before their brains implode. Hah! what a laugh. 

   92Jul07 7:48 pm from Colin Campbell
    My mother and father are both in the hospital. Ma in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Pop 
in Detroit, Michigan. He had a small stroke a few weeks after angioplasty, she 
had kidney trouble and emphysema. They're both going home tomorrow. She
wants out because they won't let her smoke there. He wants out because he
has dozens of art projects under way.  
   
    I'm totally estranged from my mother; I've spoken to her 4 times in the 
last 25 years. None of my sibs have called her at the hospital, nor have I. 
She's lied and betrayed her way into her solitary hell and we're all hoping 
she'll die and finally leave us alone.  
   
     My father is a wildly unique dude who has a worldwide reputation in 
graphics and typography. His net worth is probably $10 million. He was the 
founding President of the Graphic Artists Guild. He won a Silver Star after 
wading ashore at Normandy Beach.  
  
    After my mom ran off with a motorcycle gang member who made his living 
robbing motels and liquor stores at gunpoint, my dad never missed a support 
payment. My mom used the money to buy beer for her boyfriends, though, so I 
couldn't have shoes in the summer.  
   
    When I was a kid it just seemed like a normal life. Mom coached us all 
about how awful Dad was, and we believed it. But as the years have rolled past 
we all have rejected the repulsive old woman, and have rallied around our 
strong and competent Dad.   
  
    It's sad to think of a withered old lady wheezing and puking in a hospital 
bed and nobody will come to visit her. But she was a fiend. I see bumper 
stickers that say "Love Your Mother," but what if your mother is a monster? 
What about that kid who was doused with lighter fluid and set afire by his 
father? How should he feel on Father's Day?  
   
    Oh well. Sorry.  

   92Jul08 9:02 pm from colin
 I'm more like Kappa Fox.  In junior high I was physically attacked three 
times, once right in a classroom. I walked in and this football team jock 
named Stuart Redpath walked right up to me and slugged me as hard as he could 
in the gut, and I fell  to the floor and puked and could barely breathe, and 
then the teacher came into the room and said "What's wrong with Colin?" and 
they said I just walked in and then fell down and this happened. They believed 
the football star's story. My crime had been that I revealed that the football 
player's girlfriend had won the school writing contest by plagiarising a MAD 
magazine article complete. I finished second to her plariarism.  
    I adopted stupidity as protective coloration until midway in 11th grade, 
and when a teacher read my paper aloud to the class and then afterwards this 
good-looking babe came up to me and said "Gosh, I didn't know you were SMART!" 
and suddenly I was having a lot of fun with sharp girls. 

   92Jul13 11:38 pm from colin
 I started studying hypnotism when I was 12. There are all kinds of books 
about it at the library. I practiced first on neighborhood kids...I'd line 
them up and hypnotize them and stick pins into their arms in patterns, then 
order them to march in circles holding hands. They did it.  
   I did party hypnotism until my early 20s. Two things happened: I went to 
party and saw another guy do party hypnosis, and he made his subjects do icky 
awful things like eat rotten offal etc.  I never did anything like that, but 
it was still similar. Then at a party I did my favorite trick: I regressed a 
person to her 5th birthday and had her describe the scene. It's so cute, the 
person talks with the vocabulary and accent and outlook of a 5-year-old. 
However, the final time I did it, I tapped into a girl who had been raped by 
her stepfather on her 5th birthday and she had forgotten all about and she 
flipped out and I couldn't get her out of it and I haven't done party hypnosis 
since.  

   92Aug03 10:21 pm from Colin Campbell
    I've always noticed that when I was frying real hard and I thought I was 
out of control, nobody else had any idea of it. One time I was frying and I 
made a counterfeit sticker to get me into a motorcycle rally and worried about 
driving over the hill and then pass the gate with the fake sticker, but nobody 
else noticed, and then I entered the rally grounds and searched for my 
brother's tent, and in my frying condition every fat mustachioed guy I saw 
looked just like my brother. But eventually I found his group and cooked 
hamburgers for all of them and nobody realized I was frying.  
    On the other hand, today I got a notice that I owe $260 to The State. On 
Easter my sister and I went out to dinner at Chuck's Steak House and as we 
finished our meal I took two hits of acid. I guess this freaked out my sister 
because on the way home she was pulled over by a motorcycle cop for tossing a 
cigarette butt out the window. I was in the passenger seat and if my wits were 
about me I would have given a fake name, or just given my business card. There 
was no need for me to display my driver's license.  
    $260 for failing to wear a seat belt as a passenger. I'm ready to kill. 

   92Aug12 10:15 pm from Colin Campbell
   If I hadn't gotten divorced, today would have been the 20th anniversary of 
my wedding day. Got married in a nice hippie ceremony back in the Los Padres 
forest somewhere. We'd been living together for three or four years, and then 
within six months after the wedding we split up forever. Or at least it's been 
forever so far.  
   I often wonder what she's doing these days. A wild woman. Rhonda Campbell. 
We ran a tabloid called ORANGE COUNTY NITE LIFE for a while. Articles and ads 
about beer bars, pool bars, dance bars. We were really into bars.  
   By the time we got married she was an Internal Revenue agent. Very heavy 
job. Very handy when the cops pulled us over--she'd just display her 
credentials and the cops hurriedly vanished.  
   About six months after we split up she quit her IRS job and became a bikini 
parts delivery girl for the Santa Ana Harley Davidson shop. Then she got 
involved with a 3rd-string defensive back for the Detroit Lions and moved to 
Detroit. Later she married an aeronautical engineer, a 6'6" 260-pound biker. 
He followed her around like a sad puppy and one night I was having beers with 
the dude and he said "She only loves you, Colin."  
   He took a job at Boeing in Seattle and they moved there, and then he got a 
small inheritance and Rhonda asked him if she could use some of the money to 
buy some psychotherapy, and she began visiting a shrink regularly. Then she 
suddenly ran away with the shrink in 1983 and I've never heard anything 
further about her.

   92Aug13 6:45 pm from Colin Campbell
   It was so long ago that it seems as though it happened to somebody else. 
Rhonda and I met at an ad agency where we were both copywriters just out of 
college. We were very close and when we separated I had spent 6/27ths of my 
life with her, how much is that. 22%. Almost a quarter of my lifespan.  
   It's so strange to look back and realize that my entire professional 
career  has taken place since we split. I spent a couple years as a drunken 
truck driver after the split, then got back in the saddle as editor of Santa 
Barbara Magazine. I used to tell Rhonda all the things I was going to 
accomplish, and now I've accomplished some of them, and she doesn't know about 
it. 
   I can hardly remember what she looked like.  I have only only one picture 
of her. She was born in Sandy Ridge, Virginia, a village of 32 people. She 
lived without indoor plumbing until she was 14. She had an IQ of 155 and she 
made the local schoolmarm uncomfortable. When her stepfather moved the family  
to Detroit she zoomed through the schools and that made her a pariah at home,  
because edjucated girls are uppity and therefore unmarriageable. Her senior year 
at college she was in a car wreck and went through the windshield and her face was 
cut in a zillion places. Maybe it was her junior year. Anyway it was two years in 
the past when I met her and I never noticed any scars until she pointed them out--
to her they were huge and hideous. 
    I saw her every day at work for months and finally asked her out; I picked 
her up at her parents' house and the first thing her stepfather did was open 
the gun case and show me his Thompson .45 machine gun. Boy, those hill folk 
from Virginia are so subtle.  

   92Aug18 1:53 am from Colin Campbell @ Swagland BBS of Goleta West, CA
   Killing is tedious work. God how I hated it. They don't just lie down and 
die quietly, they kick and make a fuss long after you'd think it was over. 
It's eerie, you shove aside guts and intestines and you've got the hog half 
apart but that leg in your hand keeps kicking even though it isn't connected 
to a pig any more. You pick up a heart and suddenly it beats three or four 
more times and spurts huge gouts of blood in your face and you're glad you 
have a hat for protection. We used to go jump in the creek afterwards. The 
horses came with us all breathing hard and nervy. The horses knew we didn't 
eat horses. Right? They kept wanting us to stay near and calm them.

   92Aug18 2:10 am from Colin Campbell
   How about spinning around until you get dizzy?  It's caused by drugs your 
body manufactures. The dizziness, I mean. Some people find they can achieve 
this pleasant dizziness by Oylmpic training. My brother is a speed addict--he 
spends big cash to tweak his body far into a zone that has killed many another 
dabbler. But nothing else can rev his body like speed, he is frankly willing 
to risk death in order to get that certain feeling.  I thought I was into 
speed, god did he show me. I was lucky enough to crew for him the year he 
raced at the Long Beach Grand Prix. He was in contention until an axle siezed 
and the wheel came off and he slammed into the wall.  All I knew was that he 
didn't come around again, though, and what with all the wrecks and confusion 
it took hours to discover he was safe at the hospital, unhurt, the track 
officials required him to go to the hospital, that's all.  
   So, you see, drugs like adrenaline should be outlawed, for my brother's own 
good. I want all you children to come up before me for some blood tests, and 
if one of you tests positive for adrenaline I, I just don't know what the 
County should do in such cases.
  As for me, I like to stand 50 feet away from a guy and let him hit a ball 
straight at me as hard as he wants, and I bet can stop it. Sometimes I stop 
it, sometimes I don't, and sometimes the ball hits me in the teeth, or the 
nuts, or the goaddam collarbone if you're not watching. And if I'm watching 
hard enough I can get through without getting hurt, what a rush. And then it's 
my turn with the club. 

   23Sep92 23:41 from colin campbell
   No, I've never been arrested. I'm a firm believer in the 11th Commandment:
"Don't Get Caught."  I've spent one night in jail. I was 19 and I was out on a
date with my girlfriend and a cop pulled me over and when I looked in my wallet
my driver's license was missing. I couldn't explain why I didn't have it. It
was a mystery to me. (Later I found out my younger brother had snuck it out of
my wallet so he could us it for ID to get into some club where you had to be
18.) So the cop pulls a gun on me and the other cop handcuffs me and they put
me in the back of the cop car and take me to the station, and all the way the
passenger-seat cop was telling me I might as well tell them all about it.
"About what?" I kept saying. They put me in the drunk tank (luckily nobody else
was there) and kept me all night. I kept asking if I could make my phone call
and the guard would say "go ahead, make your call," but there was no phone in
the cell. They had to send a teletype to the central records place in Lansing
(Michigan) to confirm my story of having a license. Then they let me go 
without a ticket or anything. It turned out that I fit the description of some
guy who'd shot the chief of police that evening. 
    I do know something about explosives. Wierdo political extremists were
always trying to persuade me to build bombs for them in the early 70s. I had a
little accident with one of my bombs and after surgery successfully reattached
my fingers I never made bombs any more. No thanks. 

   92Oct17 1:12 pm from colin
 One drug I haven't tried is crack. I'd try a pipeful just to fill out my
card, but I don't expect I'd like it much. Cocaine just doesn't interest me. A
dozen years ago when I worked at a world-wide ad agency, everybody was
snorting coke, it was supposedly very stylish. At the big awards night, the
agency rented a suite at the hotel where the awards banquet was held and there
were piles of cocaine all over the room, supplied by the company. Geez, I got
so boxed. The master of ceremonies was Soupy Sales and I had to stumble
through the tables up to the podium a couple of times to accept awards, and I
kept jingling as I walked because I'd been breaking the bowls off all the
spoons on our table and sliding the handles into the empty champagne bottles,
and my pockets were full of spoon bowls. Later I slipped the bowls into other
people's pockets without them noticing.

   92Oct23 12:01 am from Colin Campbell
   I wrote an article about once for Santa Barbara Magazine about the Marine
Biology center at UCSB. I liked their big tank of sea hares. Sea hares are
these bisexual sea animals that gather for sex, long chains of them plugged
one into the next. The longest chain I saw was 7 of them, which doesn't seem
like that many but when was the last time you saw 7 hermaphroditic humans
copulating in a single chain like that? Geez, the perversity of some species.

   94Aug12 6:44 pm from Colin Campbell
   I was pulled over one time and the cop sent for the Drunk Driver team and
they made me do walking tricks and some funny finger-touching test and then
they asked me to recited the alphabet backwards. Since I'm a writer by trade,
the alphabet is my toolbox and I rattled it off faster than most people can go
forward. So they let me go. Luckily they didn't ask me to blow up the balloon
because I'd had three vodka martinis and a carafe of red wine.

   95Jan06 12:19 am from Colin Campbell @ Swagland BBS _ Frog Creek, Dakota
   So far in my life I've only done weed, coke, smack, acid, speed, ecstacy,
booze and cigarettes.

   95Jan06 1:07 am from brian @ Swagland BBS _ Frog Creek, Dakota
Weeds are bad. They take room from plants.

   95Jun12 6:36 pm from colin campbell
   At the Ugly Lamp party the other night, some guy came up to me and said he
heard I knew about the internet, and he wanted to find out how to put his ad
for a real estate scam onto every newsgroup i the Internet. "I hear you can do
that," he said. He didn't know anything about the Internet. I told him the
Internet Police would catch him and throw him off the net, and that 14
quadrillion flame messages would land in his mailbox and Prodigy would start
charging him a dime for each one.

   95Jun15 7:11 pm from Colin Campbell
   I remember kindergarten because one day they showed _cartoons_ in class, 
which was hard to do in 1951 because you needed a movie project and a screen. 
I was suspicious because it was too good to be true, and I noticed that while 
all the other kids were enthralled by the cartoons, the teachers were slipping 
in and tapping kids on the shoulder and taking them out. 
   Then they tapped me, and took me to a small room and tried to distract my 
attention. "Look on the wall, Colin, see the witch?" And I turned my head for 
a moment and the fuckers injected me with some kind of vaccination, and boy 
was I mad. Nobody told us what was going on. They didn't even tell our 
parents. "Dear Sir, we're injecting your boy with horse blood to see what 
happens."  

   95Dec07 7:59 pm from Colin Campbell
   On my second visit to the hospital as an outpatient after I broke my hip I 
was sitting in the bone room waiting area and a doctor came in and asked for 
Joe Smith and this kid with casts on both arms and a big scar on his shaved 
head responded. The doctor looked at the kid and said "Which arm was broken 
and which had the torn ligaments?" and the kid said "Look at my head, Doc, I 
have no idea what happend that day." 

   95Dec07 11:12 pm from Colin Campbell
   I may not have had a stranger life than Angela (we can't tell because she 
won't say what parts of her life have been strange), but I'll bet I have more 
wierd injuries.  

   95Dec09 11:46 am from Colin Campbell
    Angela tells me in mail that she doesn't want to expose her strange life 
to everybody  by posting in public, so I guess we'll never know what she means 
by "strange." My life has been strange in part because I've been a pinball, in 
part because I've held a regular job for only 5 years since 1969.  Swagman has 
led a strange life, too.  
    I don't know why Angela is reluctant to blab about her strangeness. I've 
found that blabbing here has acted as a sort of therapy.  

   95Dec09 5:26 pm from Colin Campbell
   I didn't know my life was strange until I left home. I found out that not 
everybody had grown up in a house where the mother hosted biker beerfests 
every weekend.  

   95Dec11 7:22 pm from Colin Campbell
   My mother isn't so strange, she's just psychotically self-involved. She's 
like the mom who left her children locked in the car in the mid-summer sun so 
she could party in the motel room, and the kids died.  

   95Dec12 5:40 pm from Colin Campbell
   Nah, I'm so far in her past she doesn't know me any more. It's thirty years 
since I walked away. I got home at midnight from one of the three full-time 
jobs I was working--I was paying all the bills and the mortgage--and my 
stepfather picked an argument with me and siezed my car keys and said he was 
selling my car in retribution for my being uppity. I looked to my mother for 
help and she turned away. So I packed my knapsack and left that night, and 
I've never been back. The next morning I went to the bank and stopped payment 
on my most recent car-payment check. My step-father is still pissed at me 
abbout this--he'd already sold the car for $1500, and then he had to make good 
on the payment I'd negated. I'd been making payments on the car for 18 months 
and had only three payments to go...a 1965 Ford Falcon Sprint with 260 V8, 
4:11 rear end, positraction, four on the floor, two four-barrels, traction 
bars. Boy could that car scoot. I could wipe out a Pontiac GTO in a drag race 
for the first 3/16 miles, but then the GTO's huge cube advantage would whip 
me.  
   Anyhow, Ma spent the next fives years on the lam from the FBI because my 
stepfather was wanted. Then she was in a car wreck and spent five years suing 
somebody and planning her future around the huge settlement she expected. But 
when the check finally arrived it was for $940.  

   95Dec15 7:18 pm from Colin Campbell
   I had just turned 19.   
   I don't know what "tweeker" means, P. Frog. My stepfather was a member of 
the biker gang that hung out at my mom's house. He was dishonorably discharged 
from the US Air Force in 1960 when he was 20 after a series of rapes and 
motorcycle thuggery overseas. He married my mother a few days after his 21st 
birthday and lived for 7 years on the child support payments my father sent 
every month. After that he had to work, but he cleverly found a way to get 
money for nothing by  entering businesses after they were closed for the day 
and removing their inventory.  
   He got caught, however, and was languishing in jail until he persuaded his 
girlfriend to  forge her husband's signature on the deed to their house and 
put that up for bail, and then fled the state. Leaving the girlfriend without 
a house. My mother followed him anyway--she figured that since he'd already 
given her syphillis, not much worse could happen subsequently. 

   95Dec18 8:15 pm from Colin Campbell
   One of my mother's boyfriends had his ears cleaned that way. Bill McIntyre 
was his name, and he had big scars on his right leg, belly, and chest, and a 
metal plate in his skull, where he was struck six times by a .50 caliber 
machine gun during the Korean war. I always thought he was a god because one 
day when I was 16 my mother asked me to go to the store for cigarettes for 
her, and Bill was there and he said 'Here, kid, take my car' and tossed me the 
keys. It was a brand new 1964 Pontiac GTO, 389 with tri-power.  
   Anyway, Bill took a job as scab foreman during a strike at Cedar Point, a 
big theme park on one of the Great Lakes, and one morning they found him dead 
in a chair in his motel room with a .22 in his hand and a hole through his 
head. They dug the bullet out of the wall and it was a .45, but the Cedar 
Point cops knew better than to dig into an obvious Mob hit.  

   95Dec25 12:36 am from Colin Campbell
   Anita Tampax. 
   My 1964 National Lampoon High School Yearbook has 37 pages filled with 
these kind of names.  

   95Dec25 5:08 pm from Colin Campbell
   Well, okay, I exaggerated. My books are all in storage and I can't haul out 
the NatLamp yearbook for the exact number of pages. It was the 1964 yearbook 
for the Dacron, Ohio high school. The seniors all had individual pictures, but 
the 9th, 10th, and 11th graders were shown in group shots of their homerooms. 
Six homerooms for each grade, 30 kids in each homeroom, 540 kids total, 60 
kids a page, that's only 9 pages. The seniors all had more or less normal 
names and were stars of the overall story the yearbook tells, but the 
underclassmen have nothing to do with the story and all 540 of them have those 
kind of names. Erasmus B. Dragon. Jack Imhoff.  

   95Dec26 7:13 pm from Colin Campbell
   I never got a girl's cherry, but I got a whore's radish once. 

   95Dec29 7:32 pm from Colin Campbell
  Bluegrass...brings back a fond memory of my high school graduation year. 
Some kid in my class bought five pounds of Kentucky Bluegrass seed and five 
pounds of fertilizer and used it to spell "FUCK YOU" on the high school lawn. 
That was in June, and all the administrators were away all summer and nobody 
noticed until school started in September, and the school ended up having to 
re-sod the lawn....hee heee! 

   96Feb02 7:36 pm from Colin Campbell
   Gotta work on that aim, Swagman.
   A couple of years ago my father had a timeshare condo slot that he was
trying to give away for the Memorial Day weekend, but nobody was interested
and he and my stepmother drove 300 miles to the condo. I was dragooned into
house-sitting for them for the weekend. Suddenly on Saturday morning they
returned unexpectedly, and it turned out that they missed their time by a
week--they'd gone to their room and found it occupied, and stormed into the
manager's office, and  discovered their week had slid away already, and
although it was Memorial Day last year, it was a week earlier this year. So
they had to turn around and drive straight back. Boy were they grumpy.

   96Feb04 11:17 pm from brian
Beer is bad. I dont do bad things.  Colin my freind.

   96Feb16 6:44 pm from Colin Campbell
   I found out something about my ex-wife that made me feel better. I blamed
myself for our break-up, but then she went on to have two more marriages that
broke up. The last I heard of her, she was married to an aeronautical engineer
at Boeing, and the guy came into a small inheritance and she asked him if she
could  use the money for therapy to see if she could cure herself of being so
screwed up. The guy said okay, and six months later she ran away with the
therapist and I've never heard any more about it.

   96Feb24 9:15 pm from Zeylan
Colin, didn't you say something once about how your mother had syphillis?

   96Feb24 11:07 pm from Colin Campbell
   Yes, I did. What's your point?
   When I was 13, my mother married a guy who had just been dishonorably
discharged from the Air Force because of a series of rapes and assaults he
committed while overseas. My mom was 34 and the guy was 20. Several years
later, after she had two children by this guy, the doctor told my mom she
tested pos for syphillis, and he put her on antibiotics to cure her. Syphillis
is a terrible tricky disease because of its three stages. In the first stage
you break out in a soft little sore, a blister on your dick. Within a couple
or three weeks, the sore goes away. Within a couple of years, you enter the
2nd stage---measle-like sores onlyour body--but then it goes away after a
month or two. Then fifteen years later you hit the 3rd stage, which is
catastrophic and kills you fast.
   Syphillis is whacky because only about 20% of people who get the Stage 1
symptoms go on to get Stage 2 symptoms, and then only about 10% of those get
the Stgage 3 disaster.
   But it's extra dangerous because the early symptoms are so mild and go away
so fast that people forget about it.
   So if you've ever had a sore in your crotch--sweet dreams.

   96Feb25 4:19 pm from Zeylan
Oh.  The reason I'm asking is because I'm assembling the story of your life,
based on the messages that you post.  I was missing the syphillis chapter.

   96Feb26 10:19 pm from Luminary Coremaster
Any diseases?

   96Feb26 10:43 pm from Colin Campbell
   Everyone got some but me.

   96Feb27 6:14 am from Swagman
You don't get diseases, you break bones...

   Colin's Lifetime Injuries:

 1957   Cut off my nose with a pogo stick
 1961   Dog bites on left arm, left butt--80 stitches.
 1962   Broke big toe--kicked furniture while running in house
 1964   Broke right thumb, dislocated right shoulder in bicycle accident
 1965   Blew off two fingers on right hand (black powder bombs)
 1966   Line drive in softball game tore my right cornea
 1967   Broke nose in car accident
 1970   Broke 2 ribs in football game
 1971   Tore ligaments in left knee in softball game
 1973   Closed overhead truck door on left hand, broke all metacarpals.
 1974   Broken toe--dropped 55 gallon drum of glue on foot
 1976   Broken nose--Took deflected line drive onto the nose
        in SBMag softball game
 1979   Broke right ring finger in final softball game
        when leaving Detroit ad agency biz
 1984   Sprained ankle in softball playoff
 1988   Broke right ring finger again in softball game
 1990   Broke 2 right ribs in softball game
 1992   Broke left collarbone in softball game
 1994   Broke right femoral neck in bicycle accident

   96Feb27 10:12 am from Zeylan
He hasn't had any in a while.  Looks like he's due.

   96Aug29 8:32 pm from colin campbell
   I was an 80s guy for a while. Before that I was totally a 70s person.
Before that I was a 60s hippie. Before that I was a 50s Father Knows Best kid,
except my mom was a biker momma.  Before that I was a 40s brat.
   I guess it's  just a 90s thing to attribute everything to the decade.

   96Nov20 7:08 pm from colin campbell
   I guess Lumy has gone through changes since I left town. I thought he was a
pretty useful member of the group back then. But I can't tell if it is
"really" him or not. I don't have the infallible x-ray vision of guys like
Zeylan. Zepp used to say he could spot an Aidan fake handle on the first
message, but I was never able to do it. Now that Bob Blaylock is questioning
my identity because of an extra "L" in my name, I have a better grasp of the
subject.
   I never understood why people wanted to use fake handles. I can understand
why people use handles, sure, but why whisk from name to name? Colin campbell
happens to be my actual name, and I get in trouble all the time on the
Heinlein newsgroup on Usenet because in Heinlein's fading years he wrote a
(crappy) novel with a main character named Colin Campbell, and the other
newsgroup members think I'm using a Heinlein handle and they rag on me about
it.
   When I post something good on a Santa Barbara board I want to be sure that
everybody knows it is from colin campbell. Or if I post something cruddy I'm
resigned to having people know it was from me.

   96Nov20 7:20 pm from colin campbell
   I only baked drugs once. A friend of mine who was a drug dealer came to my
house late at night. He was very agitated and he gave me a pint jar of a
yellow powder and asked me to hold it for him. Okay, I said. Then a couple
days later his family called me and said he'd been arrested (his 4th drug
bust) and we held a meeting and decided not to bail him out, in the hopes that
the jail time would knock some sense into his head.
   So he rotted for several months. The jar of yellow-green powder sat on a
shelf in my kitchen. It was "kif," the guy had told me, some kind of marijuana
pollen or something. I rolled it into a joint and smoked it, and got a big
headache and nothing else. I smoked it in a pipe and got a sore throat. So I
decided it was just junk and was going to pitch it, but my wife said we should
try baking it, so we made brownies with it. The brownies turned out green and
chalky, but an hour after you ate one, it was almost like LSD. Cripes.

   96Nov20 10:24 pm from Swagman
Colin, weren't you Sherlock.  Or was Misha Sherlock?

   96Nov21 7:08 pm I'm not Luminary from colin campbell
   I wish I was Sherlock. He was about 6 notches higher on the IQ stairs than
me. Iexchanged a lot of e-mail with Sherlock, mostly on statistical analysis
of lab-rat experiments and other scientific matters that Misha has never paid
much attention to. If Misha is Sherlock, I take my hat off to him as a master
masquerader. But I doubt it. Sherlock and I also yakked a lot about softball
stuff--he was 3rd baseman on a UCSB intramural squad--and Misha is, um, not at
all athletic. Although he is taking karate lessons these days.

   96Nov21 9:02 pm I'm not Luminary from Bill the Cat
Ack, no, Misha wasn't Sherlock. Sherlock taught at UCSB. He was one o' the
sharpest people in telecom; when he launched multiple account theories, he was
always right.

   96Nov22 7:06 pm from colin campbell
   I drove from Michigan to California one time with a guy who had a flask of
hash oil. Boy was it good stuff. I don't know how you get hash oil.
   It was a strange story how this guy rode with me...my wife and I were
leaving MIchigan to drive to California, and we stopped in Ann Arbor for a
farewell party fus thrown by some friends, and the hostess took me aside and
said that this guy needed a ride to California because he was dying of some
disease and wanted to visit his parents in Riverside before he died. He was
just back from touring Europe with his band, the Pigfuckers.
   Oh well, it's too complicated to go into here. The guy stayed drunk in the
back of the van for most of the trip, and the one time I let him drive a leg,
he put the van into a gully outside of Vernon, Missouri. But he had plenty of
hash oil

   96Dec04 7:20 pm from colin campbell
   In college I would buy the largest bags of Ruffles potato chips and endless
tubs of sour cream and onion chip dip and eat them long into the night.

   96Dec13 7:06 pm from colin campbell
   Life is for people who are unable to face drugs.
  If we are truly free, then we are free to take drugs. I've taken lots of
drugs. One time an injection of amoxicillin gave me such a rush that the
lymphocytes  at the amputation site allowed the surgical team to reattach my
fingers. I guess a real American would have relinquished his fingers instead
of useing *DRUGS* to  artificially enhance his life.

   97Jan03 7:14 pm from colin campbell
   I spent a week on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. What an ordeal. My
stepmother's dream has always been Caribbean cruises, and she thinks that's
what everybody else dreams about. She didn't have to lift a finger in the
kitchen for 8 straight days, and that's her idea of heaven.
   It was interesting to circle Cuba and go ashore at Haiti and Jamaica and
Grand Cayman and Cozumel, but the on-board stuff was one hundred percent
battering by the ship's marketing machine. The food was free, but drinks were
all at bar prices (except for iced tea or lemonade). The casino ran 18 hours a
day--strangely, the slot machines paid off handsomely on the first few days of
our captivity at sea, but on the last day the machines inexplicably went cold
and gave few payoffs. They had on-board Lotto, too, except instead of having
to pick 6 out of 53, you had to pick 6 out of 75. The odds on that are
approximately the same as picking one particular subatomic particle out of all
the particles in the galaxy. But if you won, it was just a parimutual
payoff--a small fraction of all the money bet on this trip. The biggest winner
on their brag chart was at $25,000.

   Jamaica was the only place we escaped from the greased marketing path, and
ther the abject poverty was amazing to behold. We are space aliens compared to
these people. My blind brother turned out to be the best haggler of all of us
when the street vendors surrounded us--he hauled out his Polaroid camera and
offered to take pictures of individuals in trade for their craft items, and
people ran up and down the street yelling about the blind cameraman, and so he
got all kinds of musical instruments for one picture each.

    I bought an ounce of Jamaican weed for $26. What a deal, it will last me a
year. The problem was that after the sale, every other drug merchant on the
street hounded me offering cocaine and heroin and to sleep with the fishes.

  My family and I sang a song on talent night and were the gold medal winners
among the 8 sets of contestants. We made up the song ourselves, new lyrics
based around a Leon Redbone tune, "Christmas Island." Now I can't get the
fucking thing out of my head. We rehearsed four nights in a row before the
show.

   Jan 31 19:23 1997 from colin campbell
   I haven't had a drink for three weeks. I've been a heavy boozer for
thirty years except for a couple of dry spells...in 1977 I quit drinking
and within three months I was making five times as much money and had a
new job writing  national-broadcast TV commercials for Dodge cars and
trucks.
   In 1987 I quit drinking, and within three months I was able to buy a
top-of-the-line Macintosh and a laser printer. Three months later I bought
a Saab and paid cash.
   Each time, I eventually started drinking again, and the only way I
drink is heavy.
   So I've quit again for 1997. So far, nothing.

   Feb 4 11:03 1997 from Mike Swanson
  I didn't know that the kind of surgery needed for a nose reattachment
was available in 1957.  How long did the 1994 injury keep you off your feet?  
Sounds painful.

   Feb 4 19:25 1997 from colin campbell
     Hey, I didn't break my wallet--I'm making the most money of my life
right now.
     Not one of those injuries happened while I was drunk, by the way.
     Reattaching noses is old hat. There's no tendons or muscles or
anything, just a blob of tissue. They did it easy in 1957. A couple years
later, there was a famous case when a Nebraska farm kid fell into a
thresher and it pulled off both of his arms, and doctors successfully
reattached them. That was 1960 or so...
     The broken femur kept me on my back for six weeks (through the Great
Jupiter Comet Crash, grrr), on crutches for six weeks, on a cane for ten
weeks. Today I will challenge you to a foot race and win.

   Feb 10 19:05 1997 from colin campbell
   Spare parts? Hey, buddy, got any spare parts?

   Feb 10 19:08 1997 from colin campbell
    I've been working out daily for the past month and I've dropped 7
pounds. I'm getting in shape for one last attempt at playing softball. I'm
organizing a softball team at my temp job...last year I tried out for a
church-league softball team and they picked me for the team (over another
guy who was 15 years younger than me!), and I looked great in preseason
practice games, but then in the first real game of the season I
overstressed my titanium hip screws and decided to sit out the rest of the
season. Geez, I hope I can come back and play this year...softball is my
life.

   Jun  9 19:56 1998 from colin campbell @Barbaria
    This weekend I went to the 10th annual Tournament of Ugly Lamps in
Santa Barbara, or "Tournee Lux Horribilis". There were about 65 lamps
entered in the competition, and I won 2nd place, plus a special award for
"Best Multi-Media Presentation."  My lamp was constructed of 12 harmonicas
and a very phallic light bulb and was titled HARMONICA BLEWINSKY. My
sister-in-law Nancy sang a bawdy version of the old Chipmunks' harmonica
song and we put it on the 30-second answering tape loop of an old
answering machine; all that spectators saw of the answering machine,
though, was a Monica Lewinsky photo collage with a red button sticking out
of Monica's mouth and a little sign saying PRESS HERE. People pressed it
all night.

 Oct 23 2001 2:07pm from colin campbell 
     Crack is the one drug I've never tried. Nor have I ever turned it  
down--it just has never showed up in my life. I'd probably try it. 

 Jan 2 2002 3:48pm from colin campbell 
   When I was in Detroit I visited with a bunch of my cousins who now have 
 adult children, and many of those kids are now worthless criminals, 
drunks and drug addicts, they told me. One kid has AIDS. There are no 
succssful marriages among my cousins or their children. 
   So, they're pretty fucked up. As for evil: my brother was the executor  
of the estate of my sister who died last March. In going through her 
papers, he discovered that there was a $35,000 trust fund for the college 
education of her 17-year-old son, established as a result of an insurance 
policy when her husband suicided three years ago. He also discovered that 
she had somehow side-stepped all the protections and had looted the trust 
fund. Not a penny left. The trust fund is audited once a year; in order to 
fend investigation, she had borrowed $35,000 from my mother and put that 
in the bank for the audit, then gave the money back to Mom. 
   My brother sued the insurance company for failure to exercise due  
diligence and the kid has got his money back. I'm starting to wonder if my 
sister's suicidal decision to have surgery (that every doctor urged her 
not to have) was because another audit was coming up. 
   She had an aneurysm on her aorta. They were going to clip out the  
aneurysm and sew the two ends of the aorta together, but her aorta turned 
out to be severely decayed from all of her steroid treatments for her 
multiple sclerosis and the threads kept pulling right through the aorta 
and they could not sew it together. 

 Feb 28 2002 6:15pm from colin campbell 
     I qualified for my Boy Scout riflery merit badge, but my drunken  
Scoutmaster once again lost the documentation. Plus, some dork had 
pocketed a .22 shell at the rifle range, and when the bus got back to the 
church where we held our meetings, he rushed out of the bus and threw the 
bullet against the wall, and it went off and smashed a window on the bus. 

 Jun 10 2002 8:22pm from colin campbell 
    I made a pinhole device and watched the eclipse. Then I walked to the  
corner liquor store for a bottle of booze, and I noticed that the leaves 
on the trees were creating pinhole devices, and the ground all around me 
was full of natural pinhole pictures of the Sun with a bite taken out. 
Quite weird. 

 Jun 18 2002 9:09pm from colin campbell 
    In this era of relentless retrospection, I'm surprised that the media  
haven't resurrected the OJ Simpson story on this 8th anniversary of his 
flight across the freeways in his white Bronco... 
    I guess I remember it more than most folks because on June 19, 1994,  
while everybody else was absorbed in OJ's prevarications, I was busy 
breaking my right leg at the femoral neck. 
    Eight years now since I've broken a bone, despite Zeylan's cheering me 
 on for still more calamity. 

 Jun 23 2002 8:21pm from colin campbell 
    I spent most of my life with one pair of shoes at a time, but now I  
have my daily sneakerwear, a pair of dress shoes for weddings and 
funerals, a pair good brown shoes for interviews, some Frye boots for 
inclement weather, and baseball cleats. 

 Jul 31 2002 2:19pm from colin campbell 
     I have never participated in organized religion, either. Not since  
the summer I was 7 and prayed real, real hard that the Detroit Tigers 
would win a lot of baseball games. They ended up with the worst record in 
the major leagues. 

 Aug 7 2002 12:12pm from colin campbell 
     I've been keeping a daily diary for 25 years, and it's amazing to  
look back and see how much I've edited my memories. I can firmly believe 
one thing, and then look it up and find out the opposite is true. 
     So I have a bottomless pit of confused stories, a lifetime supply. 

 Aug 18 2002 12:06pm from colin campbell 
    I played with the Jehovah's Witness folks for a while. I speed-read  
their bible and each time they came back I asked questions that can't be 
answered. For instance, there's only room in their Heaven for 144,000 
people. So, I asked, if you go to heaven, it might be 
conditional--eventually, somebody holier will come along and bump you out 
of your slot, right? It didn't take long for them to stop coming around. 

 Aug 22 2002 10:16am from colin campbell 
     I had a red-head girlfriend for a while, but all my photos of her are 
 in black and white. One time my dope dealer saw a photo of her, and said, 
"She looks like a murderer." 
     The funny thing was, her brother murdered her father and grandmother, 
 and whenever people found out about it, they treated her as if she were a 
murderer. The dope dealer had no idea of her actual history... 

 Aug 28 2002 5:32pm from colin campbell 
    I knew my memory had failed me when...uh, when...oh well. 

Sep 4 2002 6:33pm from colin campbell 
     I've never understood the attractions of cocaine and heroin. I've  
done a lot more coke than smack...I've bought maybe 20 grams of coke in my 
life, and none for 15 or 20 years. One snort of heroin was enough for a 
lifetime. 
     I'm an advocate of the philosophy outlined by Andrew Weil in his  
book, THE NATURAL MIND, that the majority of drug users initially mistake 
the "physiological noise" of a drug for the "high."  Most drugs just 
aren't thatn much fun, compared to the wrack and ruin on your body. In my 
20s I had roommates who were junkies, and I'd watch them shoot up and then 
go barf their guts out and then lie slumped in the corner for hours. Boy, 
was I ever tempted to try it! Right. 

 Sep 9 2002 3:10pm from colin campbell 
     It's funny how cursing has changed over my lifetime. It's almost  
accepted on the networks now, and of course is entirely permitted on 
cable. When the movie version of GONE WITH THE WIND came out in 1938, it 
was very controversial because of Clark Gable's final line: "Frankly, my 
dear, I don't give a damn." Some theaters refused to show the movie 
because of the vile language. 
     In 1968 I took a date to a Cream concert, and the opening act was 
the MC 5, and she yelled "Kick out the jams, motherfucker!" like we all 
did during that song, and then she clapped her hands over her mouth and 
told me she'd never said that word in her whole life. 
     I remember vividly the first time I told an adult to "fuck off." It  
seemed like a very daring thing at the time. I was 22, and I said it to my 
step-grandmother after I rescued my two half-siblings, whom she had 
kidnapped. 
     I thought my father never cursed, but somewhere around the time I was 
30 he apparently relaxed his diligence and now curses like an artillery 
sergeant from the Second Armored Division. 
     I knew a guy who seemed to have Tourette's syndrome: he was unable to 
stop cursing no matter what the situation. I suppose the capper was when 
he and I were at an Irish bar on St. Patrick's Day, and the bartender 
threatened to throw him out if he didn't watch his mouth. 
    He was able to control himself sometimes. We were at a diner in San  
Francisco one time with three other writers and he was spouting 
obscenitites and suddenly this biker dude came to our table and pulled out 
a revolver and put it to Richard's head and said, "Shut the fuck up." 
Surprisingly, he did shut up. 

 Sep 9 2002 4:27pm from colin campbell 
     My parents never struck me a single time. Our family was the wonder  
of the neighborhood kids, most of whom were given a daily beating when the 
father got home, because they probably did something bad during the day. 
Most of those neighborhood kids ended up in jail, while none of my sibs 
have been jailed, except for that time when my brother Scott got pulled 
over for driving a Corvette and it annoyed him so much he shoved the cop 
and the cop slipped and fell into the muddy ditch. 

 Sep 10 2002 4:21pm from colin campbell 
     I had a shop teacher in junior high who carried a half pint of  
whiskey in his pocket all the time. Between each class he'd take a big 
gulp. Mr. Stolpe, gosh, I hadn't thought of his name for decades. One day 
when he'd been absent for a couple of days he came up behind me while I 
was working on some project on the lathe, he grabbed the piece out of the 
lathe and clobbered me over the head with it. "What's going on?" I said. 
     "I won't stand for you little shits acting up when I'm away, trying  
to put things over on the substitute. He left me a note about you." 
     "What?" I said. "Can I see the note?"  He showed me the note, and it  
said that Chuck Carpenter had been a bad boy. "I'm not Chuck Carpenter, 
I'm Colin Campbell," I said, and he turned away without a word and grabbed 
Chuck and hurled him against the wall. Chuck got hurt a lot worse than me. 
     When I was visiting in Detroit a few months ago I saw an obituary for 
my high school gym teacher, who died after a long battle with cancer, and 
I hoped his demise was long and painful. I was the smallest kid in the 
class and he was always selecting me for punishment. He'd grab this paddle 
that looked like a ping-pong paddle except it was twice as big, and whack 
me across the ass as hard as he could. He was the biggest coward in the 
world and when one of the big students challenged him about anything, he 
always backed down and then gave me a couple of whacks. 

 Sep 12 2002 8:32am from colin campbell 
     Actually, I've only pulled a knife twice. Once when a young State  
Street bum wouldn't take no, and he backed away fast. If he owned a .44 
magnum, he'd already pawned it. The other time was when I got mugged at 
2am on De La Vina street outside a bar, and the guy took my money and 
knocked me down and kicked in my ribs, breaking two, and then he said, 
"Now I'm goin to kill you," and I was drunk and I'd just been huddling 
fetally waiting for him to go away, but when he said that I realized I 
couldn't let him do that, and I pulled out my knife and jumped up and 
stabbed him in the chest and ran away. I don't think I hurt him much--he 
was wearing a leather jacket. 

 Sep 12 2002 6:34pm from colin campbell 
    I've never had ketamine. I don't even know what Special K does to you. 
    I think I had PCP once. I was at this drug dealer's house and they  
were passing a joint around, and I took a big hit, and it tasted kind of 
funny, and then I was swamped by this feeling that my skin was an 
ultra-hard exoskelton and I couldn't move. I just slumped in the corner 
for the rest of the evening and it was scary, I was inside my body 
hammering on the walls but nothing was happening. Luckily it wore off by 
morning and I lived. 
    There are two drugs that have never killed anybody, acid and weed.    
    There was an article in the BBC News today about some precinct in  
London where the police captain issued an order last March that from now 
on, no more marijuana violations would be prosecuted. Officers were 
instructed to give warnings to dope violaters but make no arrests. 
    Since then, crime of every sort has fallen by 50% in that precinct,  
while it remains at the same previous levels in all other precincts. 
    It's nothing magical: it's just that the cops, relieved of the duty of 
monitoring everybody's smoke, are now able to focus on combating real 
crime.

 Sep 12 2002 2:47pm from colin campbell 
     I don't do rage. Maybe it's just because I'm devoid of all normal  
human emotion, though. Last time I got really mad was maybe 15 years ago 
in a Santa Barbara City League softball game. It was the last inning of a 
close game, and the inexperienced umpire suddenly said, "Oh, this ball is 
dirty, I'm going to put a new ball into the game," and I argued vehemently 
against it. In that league, you never put a new ball in unless the old 
ball is lost. At the very least, you should put the new ball into play at 
the beginning of the inning, so that both teams have equal access to it. 
Similar to the the rule is in the major leagues about lights: after an 
inning starts, you can't turn the lights on. Both teams have to have equal 
benefit. 
     The ump ignores me and puts in a new ball, and the other team has  
their big thumpers coming up to bat, and with the hard new ball, they slam 
home run after home run and we lose, never having a chance to hit the new 
ball. 
     A hard new ball goes a lot farther than a ball that's been in the  
game a few innings. It gets mushy fast. 
     Anyway, I stood out there on the field getting angrier and angrier  
and I wrote a devastating attack on the umpire in my mind, and after the 
winning run scored I went up to him and unleashed my verbal attack. I 
suppose my face was red and veins were throbbing on my forehead. He turned 
white and didn't reply, and my teammates were agog, they'd never seen me 
do anything like that. 
      The league suspended me for two games. But they also fired that  
umpire. 

 Sep 23 2002 8:28pm from colin campbell 
     I was standing on the balcony looking up at the stars, and suddenly I 
 saw the first pinpoint meteor of my life. At first it looked like two 
stars at the top of the sky, about six moons apart, and then one of the 
stars got brighter and brighter and BRIGHTER, and for a moment I thought I 
was observing a supernova, and then the brightening star vanished. 
     What? I said. I watched that part of the sky for five minutes,  
thinking maybe it was  piece of sky junk in low earth orbit reflecting the 
sun, in which case it would soon rotate around to reflect again. But no, 
the sky remained clear of such brightness. Took me several more minutes to 
remember the case of the meteor coming in from infinity aimed right at 
your head. 

  Sep 19 2002 7:08pm from colin campbell 
     I've often wanted that communication with the subconscious. I've been 
typing at least a couple of pages a day for 25 years, through booze and 
dope and acid and speed and opium, and each morning I look at what I wrote 
the night before, and I'm never surprised at what I find--no subconscious 
ramblings that I don't remember writing, no writing on topics that my 
consciouse mind wouldn't have written. No windows into the interior of my 
mind. It's kind of disappointing. 
     Of course, when I look at decades-old writings, I don't remember  
writing it. A while back I looked at an early 80s batch, looking for 
something or another, and encountered an event with McRary...she was 
pining to go to some high-end Montecito party, but it was invitation only, 
and so I pondered a minute and came up with a plan: she had a terrific 
Nikon camera with all kinds of lenses and attachments, and she'd never 
taken a single picture; I grabbed the lens box and we went to the party 
and at the door I claimed to be the assistant of the official party 
photographer--he phoned me and said he needed these extra lenses. It was 
good enough to get us through the door. 
     I was astonished to read about it because I have no memory of the  
event. 
     I used to hypnotize my ex-wife Rhonda and have her do  
subconscious-tapping "automatic writing," a term from the 19th century. 
She was an expert typist, and I'd hypnotize her and give her a 
post-hypnotic suggestion that her fingers would tap into her subconscious, 
and then waken her and hold a sheet of cardboard between her eyes and the 
keyboard while I asked her questions. 
     I'd say, "Why don't we do it in the road?" and her hands would  
clatter away at the keyboard and then stop, and she'd impatiently shove 
aside the hiding cardboard because she too had no idea what the fuck she'd 
just written. "Because it would hurt my back," it said. 
     One time I asked her, "Who is your least favorite Hollywood actress?" 
and her fingers tapped ten times and stopped, and on the paper it said  
"Diane Varsi." 
     "Who the hell is Diane Varsi?" she said.    
     I asked her a few more questions, and the typewriter eventually  
revealed to us that Varsi had been in a movie about step-moms who 
ill-treated children, and it echoed in Rhonda's life, but it was a movie 
she no longer remembered. 
     Rhonda was real interested in this automatic writing and pestered me  
into continuing it for years. I told my Dad about it and he counseled me 
that I was toying with disaster. 
     I've always wished that I could hypnotize myself into writing.  
Instead of having to lash at myself. 

Oct 12 2002 5:53pm from colin campbell
    I learned hypnosis by reading books about it from the library when I
was 13. I believe I can do it to myself, to some extent, because of my
proven ability to manage pain when I'm injured and my ability to focus my
attention during emergency situations.
    I abandoned hypnosis in my mid-20s after two incidents...I did party
hypnosis for laughs, but then I was at a party and some other guy was
doing hypnosis, and he made people do disgusting things, whereas I made
people do innocuous things...but we were still both imposing our wills on
people for laughs. And then I was at another party and I did my favorite
thing, age regression: hypnotize a person and tell them it's their 5th
birthday, and they report the events of that day with remarkable clarity
and in the voice and vocabulary of a five-year-old.
    Except that this time, it turned out the girl was raped by her
stepfather on her fifth birthday, and it was something she'd managed to
repress from her conscious mind all these years, and she screamed and
climbed the curtains and I was unable to bring her out of the trance.

    After that, I stopped fucking with hypnosis.
    

          *          *          *          *          * 

   "The American dream is freedom, not peace. Peace is when you shut up and do 
as you're told. The Russians are the greatest proponents of peace.  
   
    Freedom is scary. It's a high wire act, and you're free to fall.  
   
    The opposite of peace is conflict, and a free society is filled with 
conflict. Free people mediate the conflicts with cash and courts.  
   
    Romania was the epitome of peace." 
   
   --Colin Campbell--