Baba hears a lot of this. . . .

"Baba, what's it feel like to be the famous Ray Riffles of Applestock '66, but having lived on into 2002, still slogging through your daily routine, thirty-six years after all the fireworks went up?"

Am I wrong to be vaguely offended by such a question? I mean, "still slogging through your daily routine...." Llike--why are you still bothering to breathe?

My answer:

I have no daily routine, so why don't you go f__k yourself!

Just kidding--that's actually an allusion to an old Zen joke that nobody ever seems to get. =:) Frankly, most people don't have a clue about what it's like to be alive IN ANY SENSE AT ALL (that almost always includes the questioner, too, who is invariably a humanoid). That means any answer I come up with will be opaque or incomprehensible--or both--to almost anybody in the world. So why do I keep trying? Because, like Jimmy V, I never give up, nevah, nevah, nevah, nevah, nevah. Still with me? Then here we go. . . .

My answer, REALLY:

How does it feel? It feels as if 1966, spectacular though it may have been, was just an ordinary way station on the road to today, this moment. And the young Ray Riffles? A mere pencil sketch of the man he was to become (ME. . . NOW). Pro historians enshrine and elevate "the mythic cultural turning point" aspect of Applestock '66 because they'd lose their jobs (and benefits) if they told the truth, and revealed all human history as nothing but a set-up for the Present Moment. Bottom line: PME (Present Moment Enhancement) is History's ufltimate social benefit and the only practical use for that discipline.

Which brings me to Baba's First Law of Universal Experience:

Any Present Moment--mine, yours, George Bush's (it doesn't matter whose)--is, in a given context, the only manifestation of time that has meaning. "I. . . . ME. . . NOW. . ." simply connotes the following:

An infinite number of individuals ("I") experiencing themselves ("ME") moment by Present Moment ("NOW"). . . unto all eternity, world without end.

So it ought to be clear (unless you are a humanoid, that is) that 1966 is nothing more than an abstract number representing something that once WAS, but now ISN'T. It's not rocket science, people. All of history crumbles to a silly powder beside the monumental "NOW...NOW...NOW..." beating in the collective lives of a discrete anonymous humans --this includes all humans alive on the earth in any given Present Moment.

Even YOU, Reader, moment for moment, can stand for the sum total of all human experience. Be proud. And never forget to repeat after me: I. . . ME. . . NOW. . . I. . . ME. . . NOW. . .

When I want you. . . all I have to do. . . is dre-e-e-e-eam.

Dreaming, realists say, is the last refuge of the romantic. Roy Orbison (a romantic if there ever was one) understood the power of living inside the dream.

What does Baba make of this? Baba thinks it's like real estate: location, location, location. In geographical terms, when you dream, you are IN, and the real world is OUT. Isn't this exactly what the romantic wants?

I want you. So all I have to do. . . is dre-e-e-e-e-e-am.

I have a crush on my bank teller. Her name is Pegeen. Irish.

Pegeen is what is known as "a wife and mother." On her little patch of desk there's a plastic-framed snapshot of herself, her law-clerk husband, and her two clean kids. She's also what I call a Sloopy ("Hang on Sloopy, Sloopy hang on!")—precisely the type of adorably hot little proletarian kissy-face my snobby Mother shielded me from all those years.

But there's a spooky make-up detail that never fails to throw me: she doesn't seem to recognize own lip line. She paints a totally other-shaped lip on top of her real one. Why would a girl do that?

According to Sissy, who checked her out at my request, it's obvious: in her natural state, Pegeen has "slut lips," and she's trying to signal, with the prim overlay, that she's not that kind of girl.

Baba knew that.

I just had coffee & biscotti with Sissy, who has become "political" in her maturity. Problem is, she has to make up for 20 or 30 years of total neglect of anything that ever happened in what we kind of agree on as "the real world." And yet she has the nerve to twit me. "I, ME, NOW...I, ME, NOW. How is that going to help people get their rights and stuff?"

I've heard it before. And it's totally scurrilous. I'm deeply concerned with political matters. To prove it, I offer what I believe to be one of the most significant political links on the Internet. This is deep, but reach a little. . . .

I'm always meeting people who swear up & down they were at Applestock (Jetrink for instance). They guilt trip me: "Baba, don't you remember me?"

Was Jetrink really there? Were any of them? Due to the if-you-remember-you-weren't-there factor, I don't make much of a distinction between those who SAY they were and those who WERE.

Really—are the two states of being so radically different?