too wasted to do anything but type

[stilltrucking]

excerpt from Genesis Angels
The Saga of Lew Welch and the Beat Generation
by Aram Saroyan


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"In the spiritual and political loneliness of America in the fifties you'd hitch a thousand miles to meet a friend” Gary Snyder

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Passage starts on page 95

This is how I live: The alarm clock starts me. I have a hangover. I am nauseated all morning. The toothpaste frequently makes me heave. I can't keep down the orange juice, toast, and tea. I chew gum and go to my car dressed in a suit and tie. I fight idiots who don't know how to drive on a highway where thousands of cars go too fast and all the signs, street lights and policemen are confused and wrong. My car is old and unresponsive. Dies frequently and whistles in its generator. At the office I do the urgent, not the important. A friend describes it as "pissing on small fires." The meetings are not to be believed. If a tape recorder were put in the room everyone would think that someone like Perelman or Bememans was trying to be funny. It can't be burlesqued. It can't be told. All day long I am humiliated by inferior people who insist that I must do something in less time than it takes, and when I do they change it, making it only different, not better, so that I have to do it all over again in even less time. It never should have been done in the first place, anyway. Then I come home. The same idiots that can't drive are now as furious as I am. We try to kill each other for 30 minutes. Then I am home.

[westcoast]

cool. i must read the book.

~westie

[stilltrucking]

Saroyan is a poet
reminds me of Levi Asher the guy who runs litkicks
Just woke up to squirt the dirt
Doreen's Maslow's slave on my mind.

How I studied on Maslow.
How I thought and thought

That was one hell of a poem she wrote
I realize I am barely
or I barely understood it
only thought I did


thinking about the tag line of mine
I think it is proverbs kjv a paraphrase
thinking about Lew's crack up in chicago

The chemicals had become too agitated, the yin-yang had gone into wider cycle over the accepted line of behavior. He was no longer in control.

And this was happening during the "tranquilized fifties" ..............

Our minds were being rented by advertising jingles that became interior mantras of meaningless gibberish: .......................
The civilization itself was turning into a visula and hypnagogichallucination, and inside the city there was scarcely any way to escape it. Lew welch was born in wider, more open spaces, and his mind was interrupted by skyscrapers and thick midtown traffic.

He was suddendly quite lost.''So he walked into a stranger's apartment to talk, speech being his gift and also his healing.

It was a kind of sloution, but it hadn't been properly structured. Nex time he did it properly. THe civilization had come up with the solution for him: he could rent a stranger regularlyto talk with, to talk to--fro a given price.

He went to a specific room located in the city and began speaking to a man named Joseph Kepecs, a psychiatrist, who was kind to, who listened to, and counseled Lew.

...........A new profession for he industrial civilizatio: the psychiatrist allowing each man and woman to be his or her own tribal healer, wailing their own mantra of grief and joy, working through their past, the Devil, the flesh, Mother and Father, and the best and worst of times.''Which allows the man's locked and numb heart to open, for 50 minutes, to the light of a professional friend. Pyschiatry being the speciliation of friendship itself in a society which it was threatened with extinction.

But there was a bargain involved. It came at a price.

Simultaneously, Lew Welch took on the job of being a copywriter at Montgomery ward to pay for his treatment. He became a member of the society which had sickened and now would heal him: or at least maintain him.

This is the paradox of the profession of pyschiatry: that it makes successes of men and women in the very society which had sickened them, and given rise to psychiatry.

Lew became an ad man ...

edit that later for typos and such

Yeah it is an interesting book alright.hope you enjoy it.

[jackofnightmares]

thinking about the tag line of mine
I think it is proverbs kjv a paraphrase

I can't help wondering what tag line I was refering to in this thread.
I can't help wishing I had kissed your frog.
"elephants dance in baggy pants"

[SadLuckDame]

This is quite interesting. I think all of my friends have been psychiatrists. They've evolved me to be able to walk out into a strange and harsh world, by way of talking friendly with me. Including healing my spirit. I think of the Catfish, the Magician and maybe I'm Lew Welch too. I'm amazed at the distance they've held my hand. Death to Life. I told the Magician, you've shown me light.

[jackofnightmares]

The only magician I know is The Magician of Lublin a novel by I.B. Singer. A very beutiful book to read.



Freud predicted that biochemistry would be the answer. I call it The Pill To Power. Psychiatry in the fifties was dominated by the priests of Freud. Lew Welch was given anabuse, a drug to treat alcoholism which made him even more depressed. I think of Freud as cultural anthorpologist. Nobody reads him any more except for femininists.


I went to see a pyschiatrist in 1962 when I started sleeping with a shot gun under my chin.
But I think what helped me the most was moving away from baltimore and everyone I know. They say you can run but you can't hide. But I was born to run.
I have not seen one since Except for my brother. He is a wonderful doctor who still believes in the art of medicine as well as the science. No pill pusher he... He said he became interested in psychiatry when he was a flight surgeon in the airforce and treated some of the returning POW's from Vietnam. He was intrigued by the methods they used to surivive.