"The Cosmic Trigger Effect"
Or, How I Met Robert Anton Wilson in the No Coincidences Dept.
by Antero Alli
AN INTRODUCTION
October 2006. In the wake of the shocking news of one of my very favorite
authors and persons now dying,
I have been moved to begin writing a series of chapters
that have been stewing in me for
over twenty-five years. I first met Robert Anton Wilson in 1979 amidst of a series of highly-charged "coincidences" that eventually culminated in
the
writing of my first book, ANGEL TECH (which Bob wrote the preface for) and a
creative
transformation of my belief
systems that could never have happened without meeting him.
It's not that he was my mentor or father figure; that wasn't Bob's style. It was more like
being around someone whose perception of truth naturally and consistently upstaged
my
own at the time. To continue being around
Bob, I had to simply let go of my obsolete
assumptions and beliefs and, open up to the moment. And for that golden opportunity,
I remain forever grateful to him (although he may never have known how grateful).
Bob is dearly beloved by his hundreds of thousands of fans worldwide, as evidenced a few
days ago. Word got out that he was dying broke and about to be evicted from his rental
home. Within days, almost $70,000 poured in (mostly anonymously via PayPal) from all
over the world, allowing for a graceful transition during his final time on Earth.
January 11, 2007
At 4:50 am, Bob passed far and away from this plane.
PART ONE
Scary Larry, the Invisible Extraterrestrials and my Remote Viewing Experiment
Spring 1979, Berkeley CA. I’m practicing on my Rickenbacker electric guitar when the phone rings. The nervous voice on the other end introduces himself as Larry, a former Air Force Lieutenant Colonel with a kundalini problem. We don’t know each other but he heard that I knew about kundalini problems. I asked him to explain the circumstances around the spontaneous vertical eruption of the hot spinal fluid and he went on about his discovery of an encampment of extraterrestrials near Edwards Air Force base deep in the Mojave desert. “Extraterrestrials ? You mean, like UFO people ?” I asked. He said yes and that there were a lot of them using the earth’s energy there as some kind of fueling station.
I asked him if he has been able to talk to anyone else besides me about his experience and he said, no. I told him that I thought he might be undergoing a kind of kundalini krack-up where the liquid fire coursing up his spinal column met up with resistance at a certain chakra point, namely, the fifth chakra, seeing how he was avoiding communicating his experience to anyone but me. He was silent for a moment or two and then told me that I was probably right and that he would call back after he thought about what I said some more. We hung up and I went back to my 1972 blonde, semi-hollow body six-string Rickenbacker.
A week later, Larry calls back except now I am calling him Scary Larry in my mind. He wants me to join him and a group of highly trained psychics on a trip out to you-know-where, deep in the Mojave Desert. His plan, as he spelled it out, was to get all these clairvoyants out there to validate his life-shattering experience so that he could get on with his life. Right then, he invited me to a pre-trip meeting with him and all the psychics. I told him I’d attend the meeting but didn’t know whether or not I’d join them in the desert.
One week later and I’m standing in Scary Larry’s living room with about a dozen or so bug-eyed psychics eyeballing each other and wise-cracking about the upcoming trip to see the extraterrestrials. In this group I met Geri DeStefano, a large and ebullient Italian-American woman radiating enough shatkti for ten men. She asked me if I was going and I told her, probably not. Then she asked me if I would participate in a remote viewing experiment when they were out there and I said, why not. We got to talking and she asks me “what else do you do besides read auras?” I told her I was scripting my next play, a psychic soap opera called “As the Worm Turns”, and that I was suffering writer’s block. She laughed loud and long after hearing the play’s title and then told me, “There’s someone I want you to meet. His name is Robert Anton Wilson.”
Scary Larry took Geri and all the psychics out to the Mojave desert, while I stayed home concentrating on that remote viewing experiment. I had played a little with RV so I could get the process going. What I started seeing was not extraterrestrials but a group of raucous people dancing and partying in the desert. It didn’t make any sense to me so I broke trance and went to sleep. A few days later, Geri calls me up and tells me about their desert adventure. Since they didn’t see any UFO people out there, she decided to get Larry good and drunk on lots of tequila. She even convinced him to eat the worm.
I told Geri about my RV impressions. She laughed that big laugh of hers and said, “You’re for real, too.” She asked me how my stage play was coming along. I told her it wasn’t; damn writer’s block. She said she had just the thing for me and invited me to private “salon” up in the Berkeley hills hosted by Bob and his wife Arlen. It wasn’t until that very moment that I realized that the book I had been reading for the past month, COSMIC TRIGGER, was also authored by one Robert Anton Wilson. The door to The No Coincidences Dept. closed shut behind me.
PART TWO:
Bob’s Kind Offer at the Discordian Salon and My First UFO Sighting
There I was. Sitting on the couch in Robert Anton Wilson’s living room, dumbfounded by the rapid-fire laughter and brain power of the intelligencia bouncing off the walls around me. At 26, I was clearly the youngest person in the room, the baby of this illuminati of scientists, authors, mathematicians, magicians, and discordians. Arlen Wilson. Bob’s wife Arlen struck me as something mythic, wisened and totally human, with a bawdy sense of humor and an astonishing literary intellect. There was also something about her that was simultaneously severe and merciful and enormously kind. Arlen was clearly Bob’s muse.
Across the room, a serene, elegant fellow in his early forties with a well-clipped beard came over and introduced himself as a Discordian. He asked my name and shook my hand, saying, “Greg Hill”. I remembered his name from COSMIC TRIGGER as the author of the infamous Discordian manifesto, PRINCIPIA DISCORDIA. He asked me why I was there. I told him I didn’t know yet but I was invited by Geri after telling her about my writer’s block. He asked me what I was trying to write. I shared a few plot details from AS THE WORM TURNS and he cracked up and walked over to where Bob was sitting. I couldn’t hear what they were saying over the buzz of words ricocheting off the walls like so much flying lasagna.
I felt lightheaded as my gaze drifted to the window and the night sky beyond. That’s when I saw it. A slowly moving light paralleling the horizon, a point of light that took a sudden ninety degree vertical turn straight up and kept climbing. I sat there transfixed when I heard my name called..... “Antero. Antero.” It was Bob. “Greg says you’re writing a psychic soap opera. Any chance we can give it a virgin reading at the next salon ?” My jaw must have dropped because my words sounded funny coming out. “Yes, I can definitely have the first draft ready in a month.” My gaze automatically drifted back over to the window and there was that light, again, only this time it was blinking. Or rather, winking. At me. Now I knew why they called UFO’s unidentifiable flying objects. I didn’t know what it was and that made me feel very, very happy.
from The Discordian Tarot (unpublished) by Antero Alli
PART THREE:
The Psychic Soap Opera, my Discordian Tarot and 5-Card Catma
One month passed and “AS THE WORM TURNS” was finished just in time for Bob’s next Discordian salon. How could it not be ? My play had been scheduled for a private readthrough by Pope Bob himself. And, as Greg Hill says in PRINCIPIA DISCORDIA, “everyone is a certifed Pope”. It even said so on the little yellow business card he handed me when I arrived with seven copies of my play stuffed under my arm. There I was, again, sitting on a couch in Robert Anton Wilson’s living room wondering whether I would see another UFO but mostly just plain wondering, period.
The place was hopping. Jack Sarfatti and Saul Paul Sirag, two cutting edge quantum theoriests, were riffing on something travelling faster than a speeding photon. They were jazzed about some new theory claiming that information travelled faster than the speed of light. A wiry heavily bearded, bespectaled Saul reminded me of Allen Ginsburg’s younger brother. Jack struck me as some kind of medieval science-fiction wizard, brilliant and mercurial, totally present and not completely there. I sat there dumbfounded and grateful just to be in the crossfire of the white-hot neurons bouncing off the walls.
Later that night. Bob was in fine form reading excerpts from his upcoming book, THE TRICK TOP HAT, from his SCHRODINGER’S CAT TRILOGY. I sat there astonished by the highly compact, information-rich writing style he had developed. It was as if every other word triggered a different chemical in my brain. I remember thinking to myself, “this is what writing is all about! It’s all about creating magic.” Bob had this unique way with words that acted on my ear-brain loop just like drugs.
After the initial round of quantum banter and raucaus limericks died down (Bob loved them naughty Irish limericks), Arlen asked me to assign roles in my play to those present. I asked her to play Sylvia, the trance medium who channeled the ghost of Marilyn Monroe. I gave Bob the role of Frank, her droll husband in charge of putting Sylvia into a trance and after the spook left her, of bringing his wife back into her body. They both got a big kick out of that idea, probably bigger than I’ll ever know. The reading went well beyond my already heightened expectations and after a short break, the subatomic socializing fired up, again.
At this point, I should mention that Bob and Arlen’s previous salon inspired me to create, with my limited cartoon-panel talent, an entire deck of neo-tarot cards based on the premises of Greg Hill’s PRINCIPIA DISCORDIA, specifically on the wildly decentralizing central principle of the “Holy Chao“ (pronounced “cow”); a ‘chao’ represents a single unit of chaos. I called the Zero card, “No-Form”. I named the number 1 card, "Holy Chao" and the 1.5 card “The Chaoboy” (see above images). I showed my cards to Greg. Nodding his head while slowly flipping through the deck he mumbles, “You’re one of us” and then showed me a tarot spread he called 5-card Catma, a kind of discordian five-card stud or, evolutionary poker, where the winner was decided by the best creation story told using your final five cards.
I asked Greg, how could he tell which one was the best story ? His pause actually created a big moment for me. He said, “You'll know; it’ll be obvious. Sometimes the best story is the funniest, sometimes it’s the saddest one, other times it’s the most bizarre but usually people know right away which story is best.” I asked him, “But what if there are two best stories?” He laughed outloud and said, “I suppose then we enter sudden death.”
How I remember Bob (circa 1982)
PART FOUR:
Cosmic Trigger and the NeuroPharmacy of an 8-Circuit Brain
Certain books can change your life and COSMIC TRIGGER changed mine. Bob’s self-confessed neurological autobiography is written in this very down to earth style that downplays the genuine strangeness of certain events he underwent, like communicating with extraterrestrials from Sirius. Sure he was high on peyote at the time. Yet the way he wrote about it left me with the distinct impression that this stuff happens all the time and only those "waking up" to higher consciousness get to experience it. I wanted my own mystical connection with a star in the infinite sky. I mean, who wouldn't ?
Though this was not the first book to effectively blur the lines dividing“reality” and “fantasy”, it was the first book to suggest that no such lines existed beyond our beliefs in those lines. Other authors, notably Herman Hesse, Thomas Mann, Carlos Castaneda and Ursula Le Guin also did this for me. However, COSMIC TRIGGER was the first one to significantly challenge my beliefs about beliefs. Bob's way with words acted like drugs on my brain and reading COSMIC TRIGGER was like opening a previously locked door to my very own personal neuropharmacy. Reading this book impacted me like some subatomic time release bomb, setting off a chain reaction of psychic explosions for many years to come. Some books can change your life.
The Bob Wilson I came to know (circa 1979-86) was at the peak of his game. As far as I could tell, this game was initiating his readers -- in books and in person during his many worldwide lectures -- to a highly entertaining grasp of quantum physics contextualized through the interaction of fictitous character arcs and byzantinne plot designs. Though Bob was a master of this game, I never saw him treat actual living people as characters or as games. He knew the difference and took the time to show others that he knew. He was very considerate in that way. Bob seemed to belong to two generations, simultaneously; the Care-givers of the World War Two era and the Hedonic Seekers of the Sixties. I suddenly saw Bob as a kind of psychedelic mensch with a genius IQ, which for me was as hilarious as it rang true. Very true...
When I first encountered the Eight-Circuit Brain model in COSMIC TRIGGER, I thought I had stumbled across some kind of rosetta stone. Not that it provided any answers to life's big questions -- it did not -- this grid devised by Timothy Leary struck me with an awesome potential. I read Leary's source book for this system, EXO-PSYCHOLOGY (later retitled INFO-Psychology), with great interest but also, with a combined sense of frustration and promise. Here was a way of viewing intelligence through eight different modalities that, when distinguished and integrated, could significantly increase a person's overall intelligence; not just intellectual intelligence but seven other functions of intelligence, as well. The problem I had with Leary's presentation, for all its brilliance and innovation, was its imbalance between theory and praxis. Bob told me once that people would understand Tim better by the nickname he was given during his Harvard days: Theory Leary. He had reams of them; reams and reams of theories.
After one of his Discordian Salons -- where once again I played the mute, wide-eyed baby of the group -- I told Bob of my deep interest in Leary's system and how I wanted to use my background in theatre, dance and meditation practices to create rituals, exercises and tasks to pragmatically engage these "circuits". I envisioned "homo novus", a new human species born from a total embodiment of this Eight-Circuit Brain; the 8-Circuit Human. Bob laughed and told me he thought it was a good idea. Then he said something that unnerved me.
Bob told me he was currently writing a book along those lines himself, something he called PROMETHEUS RISING. He said this book might be the most important book he had written so far because it forced him to examine his own intelligence in ways he had never done before. Like a false-bottom suitcase, my stomach dropped and I just sat there with my mouth open. At that very moment his wife Arlen walked over and told me that if I ever did write such a book, Bob would write a preface for it. Bob heard that, looked incredulously at her and walked out of the room talking to himself...something about Irving Blum... (a mysterious name he would mention, again, in his preface to my 1986 book ANGEL TECH)
Arlen Wilson
Arlen looked at me with an expression that could only say: what are you waiting for ? I thanked her for her encouraging words and left their house that night simultaneously crushed and elated, totally confused and crystal clear about what I had to do. The starry night spun spirals above me. It was a very heady experience. It felt as if I had just undergone an unspoken initiation with one of the secret chiefs of the Illuminati. And maybe I had... and maybe I had...
The second edition cover art
from
Vigilantero Press.
PART FIVE:
How I Started Writing the Book That Changed My LIfe
Summer, 1980, Berkeley CA. I decided to write a book on the 8-Circuit Brain. As a 28-year old experimental theatre director living month by month on food stamps and sheer hope, I had nothing to lose and no personal reputation to destroy. I was also uplifted by the irrational audacity that I had something new to say about this system that Leary -- with his mind on space migration and life extension -- had overlooked and that Bob had only touched upon in his great book Prometheus Rising. And that was the immediate practical application of all that theory into practice.
I felt that my background in the theatre and ritual, coupled with an extensive meditation practice, was a good place to start creating exercises, rituals and tasks designed to activate each of the circuits. A daunting task to be sure. I knew that I had to practice each of these techniques myself, many times over, before commiting the results to paper. This unusual sense of responsibility was partially spurred on by the personal presence and writings of Bob's genius and by the very good fortune that Mr. Robert Anton Wilson himself might write a preface if I finished the book. I was charged up with a heady mix of incentive and dread. I had to give it my all or give it up. There was no middle ground to this ambition.
As I continued attending Bob and Arlen's Discordian salons, now at their new home in a San Francisco condo, I began to notice a change in my attitude. Though my presence remained one of a gleeful, grateful fly on the wall who occasionally buzzed with agreement, I also began to see important differences distinguishing Bob's views from my own. I did not voice these at first for dread of appearing arrogant or stupid but I did not disregard them either. One of the down sides of being in the personal presence of people with more brains and heart than yourself is a kind of gorgeous oppression that took the form, for me, of wanting to be just like Bob or wanting to write just like Bob. Ever since I heard Bob say, "Disciples are assholes looking for a human being to attach themselves to", I knew he would never wish any kind of oppression or guru syndrome on me.
Though I never felt any real oppression from Bob personally I do recall struggling in his presence with my own unmet childhood needs for a father figure (being raised by my mother and grandmother, I never knew my real father). As with many other young fans, I was the source of my own oppression. That he never encouraged or accepted my "father projections" enabled me to eventually release my projections and observe him closer, with little or no emotional investment. What I saw both startled and assured me.
What I saw was a man fully commited to developing and inhabiting a world of his own creation...a sophisticated, entertaining and labrynthian network of reality tunnels through which his consciousness traversed and cross-referenced with astonishing artistry and humor. Whether he was high or sober I noticed that whenever anyone questioned Bob, a consistent delay of silence followed as if his consciousness was abstracted so far into this labrynth that it took him a few moments to gather his answer and surface with it to present time. I began to wonder whether or not Bob had lost the capacity for direct experience and spontaneous response by living so fully and profoundly in his mind.
Since I did not know Bob before his daughter Luna was murdered in the mid-seventies, I cannot say how this deep trauma changed him. Having lost a daughter of my own I know firsthand how that kind of outside shock can alter consciousness for good. How that goes depends, I think, on how commited one remains to staying emotionally open throughout the loss towards coming out the other side with emotions intact. Emotions. I never heard Bob say a good word about emotions which were for him, "nothing but territorial signals". If Bob professed a certain freedom from territorial signals, they acted out in spite of himself whenever he felt that his writings or books were either getting ripped off or not getting the recognition (we all felt) they deserved. Bob seemed very emotionally invested in his legacy as a writer. Despite all his communiques from the Sirius star system, I was assured that Bob was human afterall.
Spring, 1981, Berkeley CA. My presence at the Discordian salons began to wane as I grew more aware of certain key differences between my views and Bob's. I was not in any conflict with Bob or his views but rather, I saw this as a kind of critical weening stage for me. The main difference that drove me now had to do with The Body. I decided that Tim and Bob overlooked The Body when writing their tomes on the 8-Circuit Brain. Though they certainly wrote "about" The Body, their language was still steeped in the language of the mind, of spelling things out in rational and scientific terms that stimulated the intellect but failed (in my opinion) in its appeal to the senses. I knew what I had to do. I had to write my book to The Body. I had to find the somatic tone and language that appeals to the senses. I also knew if I took this route I would probably alienate the intellectuals out there but hey -- that's what Tim and Bob's books were there for. I decided that my mission was to provide nothing less than an embodied approach to the 8-Circuit Brain. Now all I had to do was embody The 8-Circuit Brain first myself.
click image for introduction to the Chapel Perilous
PART SIX:
My Exile and Escape from the Chapel Perilous
Summer, 1981, Helsinki Finland. Here I was sitting alone in the holding cell of the Helsinki International Airport awaiting the verdict for a crime I did not commit. Or did not realize I had committed. I was in Finland because my dear old Finnish grandmother arranged a two-week tour of the Finnish countryside to visit relatives I never knew existed. What I failed to realize upon my arrival was how all male Finnish citizens under the age of thirty had to serve mandatory time in the army. It was the law and I was twenty-eight. The morning after my sleepless night in the airport holding cell, I was given a first class military escort to Helsinki Militia Headquarters where I was interrogated by two army officers and a medic.
The medic asked me to stand up. He looked me up and down, told me to sit down and said I had passed my physical exam. What ?! The two officers then proceeded to explain to me that my life in California was over as I was now about to enlist into the Finnish army. I said there must be some mistake; I hadn't been to Finland since I was three years old. They said it was my mistake to return to Finland before the age of thirty if I did not wish to serve in the army. After much useless pleading and some real tears, they told me my only other option to guarding the Finnish-Russian border tundra was prison time. What a choice. I signed up for active duty. I was told I had one week to get my affairs in order before leaving civilian life behind for two years. The next sound the ears of my ears heard was the dusty musty slam of the massive doors of the Chapel Perilous. And I had no doubt whatsoever about whether I was inside or out. I was crucified above the altar.
The following week I was walking around in a state of shock that resembled an out of body experience I underwent five years earlier. This shock felt as if my entire consciousness was jolted out of body and furiously radiating from a vortex just above my head in space. The feeling was one of indescribable elation and total panic. I found my way to my grandmother's house and told her all about my ordeal. She introduced me to a Finnish professor of political science who suggested, under pledge of secrecy, an escape plan. Though I won't divulge the details here, suffice to say I made it back to the USA as a felon and a deserter (my father has since gone to court on my behalf and cleared up the felony charge). I arrived in San Francisco through the center of an emotional cyclone that used to be called a nervous breakdown. I was a total wreck and unable to cope with urban life. Geri DeStefano, the psychic who introduced me to Bob Wilson, invited me to stay with her in the quiet seaside town of Monterey to convalesce. I gratefully accepted her invitation.
1981-1983, Monterey and Petauma. After arriving In Monterey I soon discovered why this outside shock happened to me. My sudden exile from my native country jolted me out of body. Though the shock had awakened the nonlocal quantum 8th Circuit, I could do nothing with that information and energy except smile a lot and act coy and cagey around people. Socially I was a broken person. I now realized it was time to put the 8-Circuit Brain to task as a map for getting back into my body. Over the next year I devised a series of meditations, tasks, rituals and exercises to engage each of the other seven functions of intelligence, all of them roughly corresponding to the seven chakra centers in the body. Very gradually and with errors and self-corrections, I began embodying each of the circuits towards further re-entry into The Body. I began dance classes, returned to my practice of teaching and performing mime theatre and, also, paratheatre. I should mention that I was also entangled in a nonstop catastrophic romance with Kendall Katze, a beautiful young elfin woman that -- despite my best intentions to keep the relationship alive -- kept me crucified in the Chapel Perilous.
I learned from Bob Wilson how writing could be a magickal art. If you can imagine something and articulate it in a certain way, correspondences in the external world would invariably arrive to confirm your internal processes and make them a reality. Bell's Theorem enacted; everything is connected with everything else. I decided to write myself out of the Chapel Perilous by composing a stage play -- aptly called "Chapel Perilous" -- and casting myself as one of the four principal players, "Anton" (in homage to Bob), a singing broken toy soldier symbolizing the "animus" of the leading female character. After writing the play I moved north to the quiet farming town of Petaluma and joined a group of friends in a self-styled commune. Within a few months I cast the play and raised enough funds to produce it. We performed "Chapel Perilous" at Petaluma's Cinnabar Theatre and in Studio Eremos in San Francisco. Enacting the role of Anton the Animus served as an excorism of whatever remaining romantic or sexual obsession had its grip on me. After the production was over, I calmly walked through the open Chapel doors with soul intact and my freedom assured. At least, for the time being...
Christi, Kallista and me circa 1986
PART SEVEN:
How Aimless Wandering Led me to Timothy Leary
Summer 1983, Boulder Colorado. After the Chapel Perilous performances my bohemian California lifestyle grinded to a halt. I had unwittingly become a parady of myself and was desperate for a big change. For me, this meant getting serious about my 30-year old life -- make a living, find a wife, start a family. I moved (migrated?) to a place where nobody knew me and where I felt confident about making a living: the new age mecca of Boulder Colorado. Within a year I found the beautiful and gracious Christi Cashner and, four months later we were legally married. Life suddenly felt ideal, as a dream come true.
In the summer of 1985, I co-produced Bob Wilson's first visit to Boulder to talk about one of his favorite topics, "Anomalies, Coincidence & Synchronicity". I remember Bob revelling in the exquisite irony and high humor staged by the venue we booked him in: a church, complete with stained glass windows, a multi-tiered altar and rows and rows of stained wood pews. I opened with a brief solo mime schtick and then, Bob the Pope of Chapel Perilous preached to the choir; a rollicking good time was had by all.
November 1985, Boulder Colorado. Five years after starting my book "Angel Tech", I hit a massive writer's block and decided to throw in the towel. That I was overcome with doubts and insecurities was the least of my problems; my marriage was also falling apart. As beautiful and gracious a person as my wife was, a significant conflict between our separate values surfaced exposing the folly of having wed far too soon. Christi was also four months pregnant with our first child. I was at a total loss for direction and wandered the streets aimlessly as I'm apt to do when I don't know where I am going. Wu wei; aimlesss wandering. That's when I noticed a poster on a telephone pole announcing a lecture by Timothy Leary on November 11th, my 33rd birthday, at the University of Colorado just five blocks from our basement apartment. The topic was The Eight Circuit Brain.
How I remember Tim around 1987
Up until then I had only seen Dr. Leary once in person at Berkeley's Keystone, a former rock club where he was the opening act for several bands that night. He performed his live wire, stand-up comic philosopher act as a ruse for delivering rapid-fire jolts of high octane data on the human brain, species evolution and fascism in America; I believe this was 1980 or 1981. I wondered if the stoned out rockers knew what to make of Tim. As for me, I was astonished by the clarity of pure signal transmitting from this man. I could have sworn I saw a bolt of blue light shoot right out of his third eye, hitting mine. And now, he was scheduled to talk on my 33rd birthday about the 8-Circuit Brain. Aimless wandering had led me straight into The No Coincidences Dept.
November 11th, 1985. University of Colorado. Sitting in the back row I saw a very different Dr. Leary. No longer playing the fool, Tim now embodied the cool academic charisma of a seasoned professor of philosophy. His lecture on the Eight-Circuit Brain was electrifying. I thought of approaching him afterwards but couldn't bring myself to saying, "Hello Dr. Leary, I am writing a book on your 8-Circuit Brain theory. Would you care to look at it ?" Right. Who was I kidding ? Stumbling out the lecture hall I drifted across the snow-covered Boulder streets that night, my brain on fire. I did not sleep that night. I was too busy destroying my writer's block with fresh hot inspiration for completing my book.
On St. Patrick's Day 1986 our daughter Kallista was born and soon thereafter, "Angel Tech" celebrated its first "black cover" edition of 300 copies I published myself under Vigilantero Press. This first edition was neither typeset nor proofread. I typed each page on an IBM Selectric II typewriter and those pages became the original masters for the printers. This first edition was 367 pages (the New Falcon edition is only 242 pages; that story later). This was a very high time for me. I decided to mail Timothy Leary a copy of this first edition in the hopes he might, as a long shot and a lark, approve. Several months later I received a letter from Los Angeles containing a computer print out signed by Dr. Leary that said:
"Antero Alli is that special brand of human -- a frontier scout for the
species -- out there on the rim where the past and future intersect."
OMFG. I couldn't believe it. Timothy-Fucking-Leary just endorsed my book! OMFG. Besides the rapid swelling in my head, something changed in me that day. With the birth of my firstborn child, the publication of my first book, and Dr. Leary's stamp of approval, it was easy to almost forget my marriage was doomed. After the first edition sold out in a month, I published another thousand and focussed on the promotion and sales of "Angel Tech". I knew that I needed to generate enough funds for my next major life change; I just had no idea of what that looked like or how it would happen.
to be continued.. .