Where to go with the autobio? Can I imagine being a woman? A businessman? A teenager? Buddha? A terrorist? A track coach? A tree? An ant hill? A marathoner? A puppy?

Probably only my real memories are worth writing, otherwise I’m just recycling received or second-hand ideas.

Coming back to the Dylan Memoir Model, I’m thinking it might be best to pick, say, five limited time periods, and to delve into each of these fairly deeply.

(1) Larva. A chapter during my year (age 12) in Germany where I realized I wasn’t weak or dull. I learned to cope on my own. Imagining the pine pollen in the rain puddles in Germany to be fallout from an atomic war. Worrying that I had worms. Painting myself brown with cocoa to play the black boy in the Huck Finn skit. The annoyingly insistent carpentry teacher, Brueder Rezas, wanting me to be licking the cocoa off my skin, urging me, “Ami: schlecken!” (“American: lick yourself!”)

(2) Artist. The marriage to Sylvia, our dual view. The grad school years. Discovering math, Zap Comix, Pynchon, hippiedom. Gödel. The night that Zappa record Chunga’s Revenge seemed to speak to me, 1971. Hearing whole Zappa songs in my head the car, no harder than understanding set theory. Creating Wheelie Willie.

(3) Transrealist. Isabel’s birth, relating to the fourth dimension and synchronicity—although I wrote about this birth already in All the Visions. Maybe a fresher fatherhood memory, something I haven’t written about. Or about transrealism. Life and science into fiction and fact. Back-to-back in Heidelberg: seminal works in two new SF subgenres: White Light (transreal), and Software (cyberpunk). And don’t forget Infinity and the Mind. My dream of finding crystals in the shale on the mountain slope I was climbing.

(4) Cyberpunk. Writer in Lynchburg, 1983 – 1986. Roland, the Vaughans, my career starting to happen, the birth of cyberpunk. The boat race, poling from L’burg towards Richmond. Talking in a field to that ex-MP guy John— what was his last name? Those kids from Richmond coming to see me, as if sent by Eddie Poe. The trip out West, effectively in telepathic contact with Sylvia as, over and over, we were able to find each other.

(5) Wizard. Retooling in Silicon Valley, getting up to speed, working three jobs, the Cyberthon. Falling in with the Mondo crew. 1986. Figuring out what computation means. Grasping the gnarl of natural life.

[Preying mantis face produced by sucking in my cheeks.]

But—why bother writing an autobio note at all? What am I supposed to get out of it? Self-knowledge. Bragging pleasure. Guidance. Publicity.

Working on these notes in the Los Gatos Coffee Roasting cafe. The guy at the next table has an ascetically shaved head, and he’s eating an abstemious salad of greens and goat cheese. Thoroughly, carefully, he chews a single wafer-thin slice of tomato.

It’s foggy every day in San Francisco this July, Sylvia reports, studying the paper.

A young woman at another table shakes her head, smiling. No health problems for her, not yet. I used to feel that way. Potentially immortal.

Who would really want to read a memoir by me, after all? It’s not like I’ve gotten a lot of emails from people who read the Contemporary Authors autobio note, which is online.

There should be some riddle whose answer I’m seeking by writing the memoir. What is reality? What’s the point of my life? How can I be happy? What did I learn by writing thirty books? What’s the missing book that I need to write?

I’m writing some catalog copy for Ralo Mayer’s small upcoming show in the funky Vienna Secession building, Sep 19 – Nov 9, 2008. I delved through my online lifebox files to find my notes of the time I met her/him in Forth Worth, Texas, during the production of my play, “As Above So Below.”

By the way, I’d love to see the play produced for a third time. Aas well as the Fort Worth production, the the Elsewhere Troupe did a partial production of it as an opera for the Keep Santa Cruz Weird Festival (shown above). I have a version of the script online as a PDF.

I’ll keep re-editing this entry this week in the context of this post, both to include my meeting Roni / Ralo, to move it to 2006, and to fatten it to 1,500 words. I had 700 as of July 14, 900 as of July 15, and early on July 16, I revised it to about 1,200 words. I think it’s close to done—I’ll do one more version off-line, a Draft Four, and email that one to Vienna.

[Begin Catalog Text Draft Three.]

I start with a photo of Ralo Mayer (a.k.a. Roni Layerson) on the right, and his collaborator krõõt on the left, near “Rucker Lane” in Vienna, holding two of my books, I believe Seek and Freeware.

In August, 2006, I saw my transreal play “As Above So Below” produced in Forth Worth, Texas. The play involves an encounter that I had with a higher-dimensional manifestation of the Mandelbrot Set fractal, who came to me in the form of a womanly entity called “Mamma Mathematica,” or simply “Ma.”

The production was great, with beautiful dancing—Ma had dancers attached to her by ribbons, serving as small, satellite fractals—just as Roni Layerson is wreathed by her satellite identities and works of art.

Roni in fact approached me after the show and said, “Hi, I’m in your play. I’m a fractal.” She had orbited in from Austria to visit the Biosphere and to dance in the show. She gave me a copy of a tiny Phil-Dickian book, Multiplex Fiction: How to Do Things With Worlds, 1.

I had a strange feeling of mirroring when I talked to Roni, as if a hologram recording had come to life. Like me, Roni had heavy stubble; unlike me, she wore pancake makeup.

Being in Fort Worth as a visiting star artist felt like inhabiting an entry in Andy Warhol’s Diaries, which was my favorite bed-time reading in those days. One thing that struck me about the locals was how many of them were dressed like cows—that is, they were wearing white clothes with cloud-shaped black patches on them.

Roni suggested that these shapes were in fact designed from the panel-patterns of the Biosphere 2 dome. “The pattern of the shadows of the space-frame of Biosphere 2, which the sun projects onto the ground of prairie are in fact a kind of non-repeating space-filling Penrose tiling.”

No less a cultural light other than Ivan Stang, the High Scribe of the Church of the SubGenius, was present at the Forth Worth show, right at Roni’s side. It was wonderful to have Stang there in his long hair and rough face with a gap between his front teeth, leaning maniacally forward, grinning at the lines. And even more wonderful to have Roni beside him.

After the show we all went to some local art patrons’ house for dinner. Stang began peforming a Southern preacher routine: “Sun Young Moon, L. Ron Hubbard, and me were talking things over the other day. Sun Young talked about having done 110 Short Duration Marriages, with some lonely people having married Sun Young himself. I’ve done that. But, if a ShortDurMar is not consummated in 24 hours it is a grievous affront to ‘Bob.’”

“So do you consummate all your marriages personally?” Roni wanted to know. “I’m interested because I’ve been calculating the number of possible sex acts that may have been performed inside the Biosphere 2.”

“I don’t practice what I preach,” replied Stang. “I’m a counter-Puritan. I tell people to have sex, and then I don’t.”

The “Ma” soprano Fiorella Tirenzi, was beautiful, and she came to dinner with her stage-wig on. She had enormous breasts with décolletage and a tight line where the mounds touched each other. Her leather blouse was open at the bottom, you could see her navel. Roni spoke Italian with her, and they shared some makeup, marking a tessellation of odd polytopes onto Roni’s bristly cheeks.

And then Roni said, “Come outside and look at something with me, Rudy. Science-fiction magic.”

We made our way outside , and Roni fetched a container of liquid charcoal lighter fluid in our hosts’ garage. With quick, efficient motions, she sketched the skeleton of a hypercube onto the lush lawn and set it alight. “Nobody has to invent the time machine, you understand,” she said. “This is a preconstruction. What I do these days is to imitate myself.”

“But does the pattern work?” I asked. “As a time machine?”

“It transmits matter through time and space,” said Roni. “Come on, I’ll take you to Vienna, 2008.” And it was none too soon, as our hosts were howling with anger over their charred lawn.

Roni and I flupped and shlupped, end over end through N-space, our ears filled with Yugoslav chants. And we touched down beside the Secession museum in Vienna.

“Every aspect in this building was designed by me,” said Roni / Ralo. “Preconstructed according to Metamartian edicts. It all follows logically from the architecture of Biosphere 2, the hermetic crystal palace of the Arizona desert, the Hall of the Martian Kings.”

“Even the dome?” I asked.

“Ah, that’s another Penrose tiling,” said Roni, pulling off her shirt to reveal an intricate tattoo on a lean belly. “My skin has preconstructed the Secession building into the past. I am, you see, a kind of alien jelly fish. A living blueprint.” Her tongue flickered, its tip rapid and forked. “Would you like to go inside?”

“Isn’t the building locked?”

“No matter, never mind.” Roni made a fluid gesture, her fingers trailing like cuttlefish tentacles. And the negative spaces around the building became four-dimensional black blocks that annihilated all distinctions.

We passed through the icon-filled rooms to Roni’s exhibit room. A low, dim space with a rumpled bed and a running refrigerator. A video machine. Mounds of tiny books. A cactus the size of a bicycle. And here Roni folded up like portable drinking cup, disappearing into another dimension.

Poking around, I found a honey jar filled with moldy mushrooms in the fridge. I suppose I ate them, for the next thing I knew I was back in California—but with Roni’s book, Multiplex Fiction in my hand, tripping my brains out.

I read the little book daily now, at every hour, wandering my monastic halls like a beadle with his breviary, musing upon Roni’s lucidities and obscurations. It’s as if the entire corpus of human art and philosophy has been compressed into this tiny paper pad, which is very nearly small enough to eat. From time to time I gnaw off a page and eat it, spicing it with a fine brown mustard.

Roni makes me smarter all the time, or perhaps it’s science fiction that does the job. Science fiction is a blue-collar philosophy of science, a tradesman’s hammer for nailing the spikes of daily wonder. If UFOs aren’t real, how can God exist? If there are no higher dimensions, how can time pass? If there were no antigravity, how could the planets dance?

I’ve learned from him to create some mental add-on software that I call a Perplexing Poultry philtre. It’s a totally bizarre lift. If you fire up Perplexing Poultry in a microsoft attached to your spine, all the things around you seem to deform into linkages of odd-shaped birds with weird multisymmetrical ways of pecking into each other. You yourself become a wave of perplexity in the Poultry sea.

Philtres are cutting-edge in terms of image manipulation. Rather than being a static video or text, a philtre is a system of interpretation. The technology has evolved from a recreational device called a twist-box that was popular in the early twenty-first centurly. Twist-boxes were marketed as a drugfree method of consciousness alteration, as “a pure software high.” The twist-box used a simple Stakhanovite three-variable chaotic feedback loop, rather than a teleologically designed process as is characteristic of the new-style Perplexing Poultry philtre, which is really meant as an enhancement to drugs rather than as a replacement for them.

Clicking and chuckling, I collapse into the subdimensions, following my mentor, Roni Layerson.

[End Catalog Text Draft Three.]

Did I mention that I’ve been rereading some Jack Kerouac? I read The Dharma Bums over the last couple of weeks, and am working on Tristessa and Desolation Angels now.

Jack was a great gloopy nut, a fanatic wordsmith, a one-man army of the night.

Publishing obscene Etruscan odes on the dumpsters of yuppie Californee.

I’m happy to be out and about with my camera again. Seeing things more clearly.

I was tired of photography last week, I was preoccupied by a (fortunately) temporary health problem. Today I’m starting to feel like myself again. Off and on I have this sense of rebooting.

Like looking at the brake light on my car, I’m all, “Ah, yes, the brake light. An electrical filament illuminating a hard plastic lens.” I mean, I knew what the light was, sure, but last week I’d dropped the maintenance routines of daily facts like that, I was too busy worrying.

But, yeah, I’m back, and all the little niggling objects are still here, all wanting their attention share. The radio remote control, the knitting basket, the glasses cases, my three pairs of glasses, my hair, my clothes, the pillow, the lamps, the food in the fridge. It’s like the world is this array of male and female snaps, and I’m a plastic sheet of female and male snaps that need to be matched up with the reality array. The lights flow through me, and my piezoplastic wriggles. Yubba gleep.

Looking around Borders Books today, I was thinking about what kinds of memoirs get published. David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs have a whole thing going with rueful tales of personal dysfunction. Back in the 1930s, Robert Benchley, James Thurber and Dorothy Parker were doing something similar. That’s not exactly my bag, the Kerouac quest account is a little closer to what interests me.

Another angle is to present yourself as the Witness to History—for me, this might be the Silicon Valley thing or the cyberpunk thing, though people aren’t responding much to SV idea when I suggest it. It’s like people are sick of Silicon Valley. Maybe if I could clearly cast the memoir as evocations of a bygone era—which certainly it would be. As I’ve mentioned before, in this context, I think of the Vanished Wild West. But I could spin it as the Godfather of Cyberpunk thing.

The point of writing this would be to entertain myself, and to gain a bit more self-knowledge here in the Desert of the Real. To have some fun. I can’t face grinding away on another novel right now. But yet, I do want to write.

All I have to do is cross the street.