After the wedding, we went to DC and stayed in a nice boutique hotel near DuPont circle, the Madera. Seeing the fountain in DuPont circle brought back a big memory rush of the times I hung out in this neighborhood when I was in college and grad school, forty years ago, we used to come in here to see the art movies at the Dupont Cinema and get cool books at the bookstore down the block.

[Bosch’s Death and the Miser, seen at the National Gallery.]

After college my first college roommate “Ron Platek” lived around Dupont Circle; I remember in 1970 my second college roommate “Ace Weston” and I were visiting Ron, a reunion. Ron had a postcard he’d gotten from Charlie Manson; he’d gotten Charlie’s prisoner number from a newspaper photo and had written him the question, “What IS the secret of your success with women?” and Charlie wrote back, “Ronald: Just be real, real, REAL.”

We three wanted to get high, and we met a chatty gay guy our age in Dupont Circle, he said he’d just gotten out of jail for dealing, but since we were so nice he’d take a chance and sell us some mescaline caps that he had buried under a rock in the circle; we paid him, he dug them up, gel caps of pink powder, we ate them and went to see the movie of Woodstock, which kind of made us forget we were high, though when we exited the theater, the trip came up and slobbered on us like a faithful dog that had been waiting outside.

Today, seeing the fountain, and the streams forever cascading off its high marble bowl, I think of the water as being like time itself, flowing on and on whether or not I’m here to watch.

What if the mescaline never really wore off? What if the past thirty-six years of my life have been a single, highly detailed hallucination. And I’m about to come down off my trip.

Yes, the last thirty-six years has been a mescaline hallucination. I find this thought oddly cheering. I’m still watching Woodstock with Ace and Ron. Ace will nudge me and we’ll walk out into the hot July night, it’ll be 1970 and I’ll be 24 again. I won’t quite be able to remember all the things I imagined — my life with my wife, the children, the books, the career, the ups and the downs. I’ll have a fleeting sense of it, a bustling of details within a snow-globe.

And then I suppose I’ll start over and do it all again. And snap out of it again. Infinitely many times on down the regress into the white light. Which brings us to the Now Moment.

That faithful slobbering dog of a trip waiting outside the Woodstock theater was my life.

Maybe when I die, it’ll be like a hallucination ending. The world takes over again. When I die, it’s not so much a matter of me coming down, it’s in fact the world that’s coming down. Coming down off the Rudy hallucination.

Really I’m writing this entry by way of getting the Rudy hallucination going again. I’ve been distracted by this long trip. I’ve been merged into my family and friends. Now, as I look inward, the illusion of being a writer snaps back into focus. “A Promethean figure snatching fire from the heedless gods.”

Back to Postsingular, what if something like that last rap happens to my character Jayjay while he’s jacked into the mind-amplifying Big Pig. He imagines he’s living out a whole life; I might run through this whole hallucinated life in like two pages at the start of the next chapter.

Regarding a Big Pig hallucination, the idea is that you’re extending your consciousness out into the Internet. And the computation can be cranked up to run a billion times as fast, so you do, like 36 years in a couple of seconds. How does that work?

Well, I don’t run my meatware that fast. I am running a sim of myself that fast, I’ve outsourced the computation into the Web. My outsourced consciousness consists of me watching a mental model of yourself reacting to things. And when Jayjay snaps out of it, he happens to have some of the outsourced memories mapped into his personal wetware.

Hi, Ace!

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