Sleepy John Estes

Syd Barrett

Best Man at a Zen Wedding

"I was in the rear, stuck in with the Rumanian bread, liverwurst, beer, soft drinks; wearing a green necktie, first necktie since the death of my father a decade ago. Now I was to be best man at a Zen wedding. Hollis driving 85 m.p.h., Roy's four-foot beard flowing into my face. It was my '62 Comet, only I couldn't drive—no insurance, two drunk-driving raps, and already getting drunk. Hollis and Roy had lived unmarried for three years, Hollis supporting Roy. I sat in the back and sucked at my beer. Roy was explaining Hollis' family to me one by one. Roy was better with the intellectual shit. Or the tongue. The walls of their place were covered with these many photos of guys bending into the muff and chewing . . ."
—Charles Bukowski, "The Great Zen Wedding," Tales of Ordinary Madness, 1983

Loretta

Always on the Way

"Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
—Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky, 1949

Black Uhuru at Reggae Sunsplash, 1984

In Spite of Ourselves

John Lilly: Through the Center of the Mandala

Sir David Attenborough on God