And that thing in the corner is where they found him. It’s a couch, by the way, worn and torn down to the foam by a guy who spent years on it going and then simply being insane. Like everything else I saw when I first walked into his house, that couch horrified me. The trails worn into the carpet, the grease spots on the walls - all of it showed instantly what’d taken years of hermitage to create. But the couch… that hit me on a whole different level. It wasn’t just the most fucked-up couch I’d ever seen, it was pure fucking evil - a portal to hell. So it didn’t surprise me in the least when his sister told me that’s where they found him.
He’d been dead for something like ten days, which also didn’t surprise me, and his sister was dealing with the people who specialize in cleaning up after that sort of thing. The first company she called said it could cost as much as forty-thousand dollars, so she kept looking and found a place that would do it for seven. When dealing with death it helps to shop around: they don't call it vulture capitalism for nothing.
This is a follow-up to my first diary here at Daily Kos, "I have a friend who's armed and insane in Portland Oregon." The really grim parts are mostly done with, but if you want to skip the rest, the moral of the story is if you know anyone who’s living like this and you don’t want to lose them, get them out. And if you’re living in a room like this, it’s time to get help.
Since I was the only friend of his who could be found, I helped his sister through the post-mortem. Although the clean-up required pretty much everything to be destroyed, I asked if they could save his laptop. He’d spent the last five years working on a manifesto, calling it a “Bill of Rights for Mankind,” and I hated the thought of it just disappearing from the face of the earth. It’s titled “Demokracy” and here’s how it begins:
"The Spiral (aka the Way, the Movement, Enlightenment, Revolution, Evolution, Earth Mythology, Truth, Love):
All life is an intertwined spiral of energy, similar to the intertwining of Celtic knots, Taiji ways, African rhythm, root systems.
It expands in spirals. There can be sharp angles, but they are part of the spiral.
Souls are single complex strands, intertwined with others.
Sex, morality, camaraderie, criticism are strands.
People try to crowd, connect and mimic, or connect then pull away to create knots of control.
A person's "Integrity" (as defined in the Tao Te Ching), is the arrangement of strands of thought, mood and action; it's the the source of happiness. All problems are tangles and breaks."
It goes on for another 200 pages or so. It would probably read like gobbledy-gook to most, but it’s fascinating to me. We met in high school, both cast-off to boarding school by relatively wealthy families who felt we weren’t getting enough out of public school or, more likely, simply couldn’t deal with us. George (his real name) and I were best friends in the years where it counted the most - fifteen to about twenty-two - learning and musing about life, love, music, friendship and philosophy together. And drugs.
Specifically LSD.
That spiral he’s talking about is one we’d seen together a few times, and any of you who’ve gazed down that rabbit-hole know what I’m talking about. It’s that vortex shimmering in the distance when you’re hallucinating, that thing you can only catch a glimpse of and feels like it could answer all your questions if you could just stare into it directly… if you could just get a little higher. I think of George’s madness and death as a cautionary tale of what happens when you try to stare into it for too long, and his manifesto is my way of gazing by proxy.
Psychedelics aside, you could do worse to find something to fixate on than spirals. They’re the structure of both the DNA inside us and the universe around us. Spirals are what happen immediately after the chaos - the organizing principle to things that have been violently ejected. Drop a heavy book in a dusty corner and you’ll see the whole universe being formed.
The spiral motif also explained a lot of the junk he had piled in his house, as you can see in the stuff piled up on the right. Also in there is the pair of pants where he kept his gun, though I didn’t know it when I took the picture. I took it and two or three others while he was in the bathroom, to send to his family who’d sent me there to check up on him. I felt like I was betraying him, just as I do a bit now by publishing this, but he’s been gone a long time now, and if this can serve as a wake up call to anyone then so be it. I’m sorry I couldn’t help him, and I’m sorry he died, but I spent enough time with him in that room to know he was way beyond help, and that couch was his ticket out of hell rather than into it. Just so you know, he died from internal bleeding caused by all the alcohol. The coroner told his sister it was painless, but the police photos of the scene told a much more horrifying story.
I think of him and that room whenever I post photos like this and make light of my own appearance as a mad man. For the last two years I’ve never been in one place for more than a few days. I stay with friends sometimes, but mostly in motels, and wherever I am I’m never more than five minutes away from being gone. I’ve been telling myself it’s for the sake of sign-hanging, fighting fascism, trying to show people they have the right to speak out a whole lot louder than they do. But not so deep down I wonder if I’m just running for the sake of it, and that if I ever stopped I’d turn into George. Y’see, it wasn’t that we were just friends, we were practically the same guy: same look, same background, same senses of philosophy and humor. We even had the same hair, only his was dark and mine was blonde.
And I think by now I’ve earned the right to wonder if I’m not practically just as insane as he was, still painting signs and playing cheerleader for a cause any sane person would’ve abandoned years ago. It doesn’t matter how many people praise, thank or agree with you - if you keep doing something nobody else does eventually you’re going to start to wonder why. Either I’m crazy for hanging signs or you’re all crazy for not doing it, and what I know about the Constitution, the history of fascism and simple mathematics still tells me that it’s you. After more than two years of this though it’s safe to say we’ve all been driven a bit mad, and it’s a wonder we’re coping as well as we are.
On a cheerier note, my Go Fund Me reached and surpassed its goal of $3,000. I think it’s over $4,300 now. The people who sponsored me upped the goal to $10,000, but I think that’s because that’s what you’re supposed to do. Whatever I get beyond expenses I’ll be sharing with Thorbites, Cisco and Scorchsky, who’ve been faithfully speaking out in LA, Fresno and Phoenix and kept me from feeling quite so alone in this.
While I think most of you are capable of walking onto an overpass or some roadside fencing and strapping some cardboard to it, I’ve just got to figure out a way of getting you to do it with cardboard that has words on it.
Give a little if you can…