A Fourth Way Standup

LORD OF THE SLIES

A Fourth Way Standup

PREFACE / 2009

When I first wrote this piece in 2005, it was an attempt to rid myself once and for all from the nightmare parts of Alex Horn's group, not the good I got out of it. Of course, I did get some good out of it. My father used to say, nothing can be sliced so thin it doesn’t have two sides. One can, after all, grow from any life experience, including a train wreck.

Exasperated, I wrote in an abrasive, taunting rant, because it was what worked for me at the time. Publishing it to the NET, then receiving hundreds of e-mails from people who agreed, and only a few from those who did not agree, I began to see more of what I actually got from Horn, and it softened my former outlook a little. The brutality that surrounded Alex, as mostly reflected toward "us" by his "special Nazi students" was appalling. I needed healing. I wrote the piece below as an overwritten jibe, a fountain of liquid shit, to simply get it out of my system (if possible), from certain doubts and ideas haunting my Lunatic Type life.

The "ideas" no longer bother me nearly as badly as they did. I have gone over this article a couple of times recently, conveying some of the good as well as the bad. The piece is still abrasive in the style I "chose" when first writing it. However, I now recognize that everyone has a unique experience with the Work and cut some slack for that. I cut no slack for unholy abuse of students and especially children, as evil in action. Mike Barnett (RIP) became an Alex clone and did much damage in Colorado. His wife is still stomping through student lives with no remorse. At least, that is what I am told by those who escaped her madness. I did not want to ruin this mess, or should I say, take away the original intent and flavor. Just tighten it, and take out the obsessive need to make bad jokes. There are still plenty of bad jokes here, but I have trimmed the worst.

Nearing seventy, I realize that even though writing this years ago helped flush "Work" from my psyche, actually I know now that once exposed to these ideas and practicing simple exercises with other students (not all bad), it is quite impossible to dump "G" for good, no matter what I do. Oh well.

Gurdjieffian Trivial Pursuit, from 1974 to 1982 broadcast a radio show called: Radio Mystery Theater, one episode of which is called: The Magus. Written by Elspeth Eric, starring Fred Gwynne, Carol Teitel, Jada Rowland and Russell Horton, it tells the story of a young servant girl who falls beneath the charms of a Magus, becoming entranced in his presence, forsaking her mother and would-be suitor. Of interest, is Gurdjieff being made part of the story near the beginning.

An MP3 can be listened to or uploaded at:
http://www.mp3hunting.com/the-magus.73b24.html

A FOURTH WAY STANDUP
© 2009 Dave Archer

Gurdjieff is psychic crack cocaine for eggheads.

People who would never suck a glass pipe in a million years.

Upscale seeker-somethings, subscribers to Intellectual Lifestyle Magazine, or they meet some off-lander "G" sharing a cab in the rain, or an old friend calls and they click-in and never click-out, even after they leave or get bounced by some flaming whore from hell with NO right to psychically eviscerate people.

First hit.

Z'it.

Z'ven free.

Self-Remembering.

In the vernacular: Split Attention.

For instance: WATCHING myself make notes for writing this, while watching Gone With The Wind, and not getting lost in Scarlet O'Hara's hooters; yes, just because I think I’m gay sometimes does not mean I don't appreciate a good rack. I have four grandchildren so I must have done something right. Not that being “gay” is wrong. Gurdjieff had his group of lesbians called “The Rope.” Still, if you are a homo today, better not bring it up at a meeting. Split attention: BEING in the Roxie-retro, observing O'Hara's hooters, while simultaneously observing my own thoughts and posture, that is, my own hairy Norwegian hooters, passing thoughts, passing popcorn, passing gas, SPECIFICALLY: my predicament in time and space, but especially: tits. Split attention is good. It changed my life in positive ways. Working toward experiences when intellect, emotion, and body are balanced, even for a moment –– bucking the tide of insidious sleep, in the quest of "Esoteric Christ Sun Absolute," feeding, strengthening: "essence" through "being Work." When I make a dated aim, I make being: building magnetic center, blah, blah, blah. Yes, I got some good things out of it I still use today. Thank you. I also got hammer-headed bad, along with a lot of others, and I'm still deciding if what I got was worth what I paid. That's all. There was a lot of student abuse, both by the teacher, and students going after each other. Time to rip a new asshole in the body of so-called "Esoteric Christianity." Allow me then, to shove a Maglite up Beelzebub's butt before you kiss it, because there are a few things you ought to know before SCUBA diving with the Creature From The Black Saloon.

G Work is transformation through eccentric (esoteric) ideas you would have rejected one hour earlier. Anything that has the effect of "changing" an entire world view in one hour, beware. Study all maps. I didn't. I fell into a G-hole. I survived with injuries. The telephone guy I landed on, however, died of a broken neck. Six weeks later, his pregnant wife died of a broken heart. The only good news, the baby survived. The bad: the kid was raised by Gurdjieffian child neglecters. It's true: my observation and that of dozens of others is this: not insignificant numbers of Gurdjieffians consider children fairly worthless until after they grow up, therefore ignore them, using situational sliding scales from say, mildly creepy to out-right evil. Shame on their sorry asses. Indeed, since releasing this four and a half years ago, I have received dozens of e-mails from grown kids raised in G. They tell me they did not see sex in public, but they were terribly neglected.

(In one group in Sonoma, run by Anne Haas, the children all ran away one night to the Santa Rosa Police to report they were being abused. The cops took them back, and Anne, as only a Gurdjieff Witch can do, "convinced" the cops, through SLYING, that everything was just fine, at which point they left. ANNE HAAS, you are a bedridden black hole, having your last faithful students serve you platters of psychiatric pills while you rave like the RED QUEEN. The children you hurt are making a documentary movie about your sorry butt. Do you have any idea how many kids you "raised" that now hate your guts. See Hecate, children grow up. Guess you never thought of that. Oh, that's right, sociopaths don't give a shit. Now it's your turn, and there will be no fun at all. You knew exactly what you were doing. You wanted piles of money, that's all. Hey, I'm only writing the way you have talked all your four-letter life. I was there Anne when you were married to Alex. I heard you screeching like a banshee. We all did.)

Just reading "G" can release: Endorphilect, psychically identical to pharmaceutical grade morphine. Gurdjieff study is an occult feast upheld by “Work books," for edifying the "Sly Man's Way," that is, of rousing AWAKE through: Self-Remembering with the right teacher and Group. Shop around carefully. That's my advice. There must be some good teachers out there who don't want to "shear your wool" and become millionaires at their students' expense. There must be some that don't want your ranch or to kick you in the balls. When you first hear the Work is called the "Sly Man's Way," unless you are Clem Kadiddlehopper ripping-off a can of pork and beans in Safeway, or the Long Island Lolita shooting Mary Buttafucco in the jaw, naturally, you recoil like Fisher's pistol. Let me put it this way: if you stay, and later down the road, find yourself acting as if you've been ear-tagged by the "Inner Circle Of Humanity" for a little "Objective hoodwinking," such as stealing a bottle of Dom Perignon from your boss, because after all, your boss lives, at best, in the "Subjective" Good Householder Exoteric Circle of Outer Darkness of babbling homo-hobos like me — that is, where fools die in ditches like dogs.

STOP!

and ask yourself this...

Do I really want to shove my face into Satan's buttcrack?

As Ouspensky (direct line) Gurdjieff Teacher, Mr. Robert S. de Ropp, warned me on my first morning with Alex Horn: "If you sup with the Devil, have a long spoon." I should have listened. Still, in retrospect, I did get some good out of Alex's wild ride. For one thing, sailing the Pacific from Hawaii to San Francisco on the 161' Goodwill, one of the world's great yachts. Calling for volunteers for the crew, Alex said anyone owing money to "the Work" (him) could not go. Busted. Man, I wanted this trip more than anything I had ever longed for in my short brutal life. Nancy, my Group girlfriend at the time, looked me in the eye and said, "Alex says rules are meant to be broken, David." A direct challenge. I sailed. And left the Work too, owing Alex. Ha! That's the only way to leave a Magus. Even though my experiences on the high seas were nothing less than lordly, after what happened in my life, plus the lives of some of my best friends after we left the Group, I could have done without it. Let me say this: I chose to join up. It took two friends to convince me. I did not want to join. I take full responsibility for eventually "tagging along" and joining. No excuses. I may sound like I'm "blaming" others for my choice. I am not. I am pissed off at some of the outrageous things I witnessed, that’s all. I got myself in, not my friends, and I got myself out.

The Gurdjieff Work is a Magus Licensing "School" having to do with Lucifer, not Christ, esoteric or not. Gurdjieff said the Fourth Way was against God. SLY: that fine Homo sapiens attribute most often endured on the face of some oleaginous SUV pusher with a bull pizzle for a nose. Both Teachers and students handle this permission in a variety of ways: sometimes, ah, rather badly. Hitler said: "The best liar is the best magician." I never thought I would say, "Thank you, Herr Shickelgruber." I must though, for unlike Gurdjieff, at least he put it succinctly. The way of relying on yourself, and yourself alone, echoing Crowley's: "Do As Thou Wilt Is The Whole Of The Law." When you Work with a "Teacher" and Group, you are your own walking forensics / biotech lab. The Teacher is there to shock you awake. Beware of Teachers who shock with swords. Ron Russell witnessed Robert de Ropp run a student out of his ashram door, then down Sonoma Mountain Road, "shocking" away with a Samurai sword and barely missing. Being a Gurdjieff student comes with the "right" to steal, cheat, fool, lie. Believe me, this was freakin' fun. Many Gurdjieffians would highly disagree with me, because they are not like that in their New Hampshire Group or whatever, and they never terrify students into staying by threatening to chuck them into a ditch. I'm not writing about them. Or they dismiss Alex Horn as "not a real direct line Gurdjieff teacher." Who cares. Gurdjieff himself was a monster, a hurricane force SOB. Stories abound of his Talmud temper: THUS, handing-off Full License to later group commandos and their progeny.

Face it, judging Objective / Subjective in the world was like getting a brand new amoral trampoline of my very own. As if my amorality wasn't bad enough already. Objective Eukanubas: GOOD! Subjective sheep: baaaad. Sheep are to be fleeced, period. Gurdjieff taught that. Those billions of dying dogs so horrendous they pee their used Armagnac on the davenport, then sleep on it. Puppies so unConscious, I get to pick their purses and laugh about it later with my Objective friends. “Good evening, I'm Riddick. I will be your waiter tonight. Welcome to Café Crematoria de la Paix.” We always hear about Monsieur's enormous compassion; that G took care of a lot of people financially. Of course, he used student money for it; plus, the fortunate were, after all, his Prieuré family members, countless illegitimate kids, and immigrant friends.

When it came to G's view of the world, however, absolute zero. There is no compassion in this Guote:

"One may say that evil does not exist for Subjective man at all, that there exist only different conceptions of good. Nobody ever does anything deliberately in the interests of evil, for the sake of evil. Everybody acts in the interests of good, as he understands it. But everybody understands it in a different way. Consequently, men drown, slay, and kill one another in the interests of good."

Gurdjirrhea

Katman-du-du

Externally Consider if you will: "Night Stalker," Richard Ramirez's baphomet-scrawled hand held up in court. The same hand that murdered women after raping and torturing them (AND) making them recite, "I love Satan" before slicing them up and writing on the wall with their blood. Gurdjieff would say Ramirez was killing for personal "right" reasons, therefore another Subjective tragedy, not evil. Bullshit. Ramirez wasn't having his own "conception of good" at all. Go back and read the highlighted line again. The line is a G-key into you. It is not a you-key into G. Gurdjieff is not giving you some "ancient" Victoria's Secret. Maestro is magnetizing your moral compass. It’s a power key, opening your wallet, ranch, and ALL of your time. Or, it can be, and often enough has been exactly that. A Magus never lets anyone near their inner real estate, only allows them to Work on the farm they just gave them. Planting, digging sewer lines, cleaning the pool. Notice where the line is placed in the quote. Read the quote again and see how easily it slips between your common sense filters. It is not truth with a capital “T”, yet one tends to buy it. Especially those thirsting for something "good" for whom it stands stiffer than the Philosopher's Bone. Don't drop your Dove in the shower.

In slight-of-hand card magic, it's called: forcing. There are classic "forces." I saw Penn and Teller do a great bit on card forcing once, explaining exactly what a card force is while they were actually doing card forces, and people took the forced card every single time anyway, convinced they were choosing randomly. Blavatsky used slight-of-hand. Gurdjieff, too, performing tricks on stage. That Gurdjieff was an accomplished hypnotist –– as are Penn and Teller, as is every magician, stage or mage –– is not only standard knowledge in Gisney Land, it is honored by many, even when they suspect, as if hypnosis used by a Lucifer Magus is a good thing for anyone who wanders in. Folks, people. We are told Gurdjieff helped people through hypnosis with alcoholism. Great. Too bad he didn't use it on himself. Mothers Against Drunk Drivers would not have awarded him that posthumous plaque made from what's left of the tree he ran into. Oh, that's right, G staged his car crash to shock his students.

Stop!

The highlighted line is a hypno-move into you, as dangerous as getting stabbed in the chest. If you don't give a crap what happens to your psyche, and you like to do terrible things to yourself, because you are riddled with guilt, and you need to be punished for your secrets because no one in society knows about them, therefore, the Puritan in you, MUST tell all, you'll love Gurdjieff.

Please. Evil is ACTION, not THOUGHT, a truth so blatant the Roto-Rooter guy gets it. Rape is evil. You can say a rapist commits every crime in the "interest of their own good," from their own "understanding," still, their action is evil. If you think the "Night Stalker" was following "his own conception of GOOD," therefore his action was not really evil, you are indeed the idiot G declared you to be. Society has the word "evil" to designate actions beyond the pale. Eight-year-old kids know this. Ah, six-year-olds, too. It's Common Sense, THE ancient repository of Esoteric Truth flushed during Philosophy 101. Intellectuals think too much. And they know it, too, which is why Orage dug a hole to Hell, then filled it in again for G. To be fair, the "job" did give the man six-pac abs: a plus there. Digging did get Orage out of his poet head into sweat and extreme pain. Perhaps pain is after all, the only way we ever heal and grow, really. Benny Hinn should haul off and sock every crippled Pilgrim in the jaw. It might work better. Healing through intentional pain is a Native American rite of passage, thousands of years old. Gurdjieff professed this in the '20s & '30s. We thank the man for his early observations; we need, however, no ancient Sarmoung scroll to know evil is action, not thought, therefore, fairly easy to sort out in most cases.

Gurdjieff teaches: "Subjective man" cannot DO. Oh, really. Two longtime neighbors in New Orleans got into an argument over the Ten Commandments. One went home, and instead of getting his Bible and checking the passage, grabbed his .38, then went back and shot the 6th Commandant straight through his neighbor's heart as he sat rocking on his front porch thinking, "... jeeze, I sure hope Barney moves to Florida soon." Barney DID the guy, okay? He was wrong about the scripture, too. Bummer day. Action. If the man pulled the trigger during a schiz-isode, thinking he was killing Quasimodo, that is not evil, that is mental illness and he goes to the lock ward. There are reasons to shoot, i.e., some creep driving off with your kid. They are not always easy to sort out, but in the Objective sense, they represent Justice, a fine Lady, indeed; one that Gurdjieffians reject as the projection of Subjective sleeping humanity. Shooting your neighbor is usually evil. My Jack Russell knows that. The last time he shot another dog, he crawled away ashamed and shook in the corner of the room.

The problem G-folk have with Common Sense is, they do not like common folks, externally considering them as mechanical meat-machines rather than simply: being them, as they are. They get used to using sleepers. There's a separation, subtle at times, blatant at others. G-folk profess being in the midst of the County Fair, NOT of it. G-folk dislike "the herd" as much as eco-protesters squirm around rednecks. We get that way because we think we are a little more awake than others, another type of sleep. Sleepers are the obvious wriggling pupae of the world. We may not be butterflies yet, but at least we're making cool cocoons.

Working toward "Conscious," in the midst of the marketplace breeds a form of G License called: "Not Identifying," AKA: one giant rover-come-over step "out of THEM," as if "they" are the enemy, or at least have psychic TB. "Not Identifying" is like the movie COLLATERAL, when Cruise's character says, "No, I didn't kill him, the bullets and the fall killed him." It just so happens that by "Not-Identifying," many G-folk end up: Oh –– So Special. Dying dogs like me: Oh –– not so Special. That is, until their Subjective brownstone is on fire and they have to call some sleeping sheep at 911, then endure all those idiot firemen putting out the blaze they started with an unobserved candle.

When I joined Alex Horn's Group, on the morning of the first day, we Guppies swished our tails around nude on the ranch wearing "Special Asshole" signs hanging around our necks. The original circle of around fifteen that formed around Alex started in my friend Ron Russell's living room, almost all from the Sonoma, California area. In the beginning they had a meeting with Alex where "they" decided to go out and get good jobs to pay the Work, i.e., Alex. They did just that, regrouping in a few months, then invited their friends to join. Lucky me. And since they already felt "Oh –– SO Special," they devised "Special Asshole" signs as a way of communicating to us how "Oh –– so NOT special" we were. In retrospect, I was privileged to have a unique view of how a dark Magician forms a Group of loyal supporters almost overnight: MAGNETIC CENTER, good jobs, money, money, money, feasting, wine, dancing, stories, plays, rituals, plus a "system of practice" that can never be mastered.

Sleeping people are to be charmed and manipulated any way a Gurdjieffian sees fit, when and if such action is part of what is called: MAKING A WORK AIM. That is, accomplishing any stated AIM. Gurdjieff was a spy. A real one. His Chief Feature: Intrigue. And spying is lying. And sly liars are sociopathic in the sense of not feeling bad about what they "do." So, let me see, not that I'm so moral, however, just asking: if I am awakening when I pull off any particular evil act on some sleeper during a journey toward some particular aim I am working to accomplish, in order to "grow being" in myself, is that not at least evil-lite? The notion is: when one sets out to truly "DO" something intentionally as a Work AIM, Mother Nature RESISTS effort. A vine growing in rock makes the finest wine they tell you, because it has to Work the hardest. The making of any Hollywood movie, from bad to best, is met with thousands of resistances. It's all about people who believe in something so strongly, they push hard, harder and harder, for years, from script to screen, in G, "by any means necessary." Against resistance, G-folk use: force, slipping around, digging under, being "slyly" invisible, hiring a bulldozer to finish the job, sneaking into a farmer's field and stealing a sheep to sacrifice, ripping off hubcaps, plus a thousand others — accepted if one is sly enough to get away with them while accomplishing a Work AIM. In fact, NOT making a stated (dated) Work Aim is nothing less than: Ganathema, creating much crime in the name of knowing and practicing ancient nitty-gritty.

A woman in New York, the wife of a recent G abductee, called to tell me her husband was keeping books in a special drawer, each title hidden in brown paper glued to the books. She was told never to look in the drawer. She said her husband, a waiter in a fine restaurant, was gone a lot now. One night he came home with a stolen bottle of Dom Perignon, for which he was fired the next day. He had only been in the Work for a couple of months. Gee, I wonder where he got that idea?

She said he had never stolen before, that it just, "wasn't him."

CHAIN OF COMMANDOS

Gurdjieff took an ETERNAL Sacred Oath (his words) to keep the Sarmoung Brotherhood secret, yet published his findings anyway. Parable or not, the great MASTER even gave away the Sarmoung name ... well, of course he coded it, and that's not the real Sarmoung name which is: Gnumoras (pronounced ga-new-mor-as). And let me say this: Gnumoras is not one bit funny. If you ask, "Why would George do that?" at the wrong meeting, you might just get a mambo dance on your eardrums from a grapa guzzling witch uglier than George Bush's butthole. Dang good question, too. And don't tell me G did it for suffering humanity. The last time a Magus did anything for suffering humanity was when David Bowie helped a new musician without stealing his songs and making him crawl around the floor naked squealing like a mouse in a crush video.

Face it. Gurdjieff's Work was debased by the man himself; until nowadays, every NET speck is there for all to see. Think of it. The entire Ancient Order of Gnumoras: OUTED. Admit it. In the understatement of 2004, Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld testifying under oath before both the Congress, later, the House, concerning the Abu Ghraib prison Torquemada photos: (I paraphrase) "we're still learning, for instance, about operating in the DIGITAL age ...." No e-shit. Can you honestly look me in the I's and tell me Donald Rumsfield’s "Rummy" isn't worth at least half a Rumi? Not funny? You can't go to a proctologist today, without seeing a poster for the "Sacred Gurdjieff Movements" in the waiting room, as if, "Hey, everybody gets to do it now, even Bill Clinton." Believe me, here comes Grobics. I mean, Richard Simmons, "Sweatin' To The Harmonium." Oops, we already have that in the Sacred Dances. My critics say I should have done the "movements." They may be right. It’s too late. So, how about a moving company: "Let George Do It."

Hey, it's White Glower Day at Macy's!

Only Bla-bla-vatasky MASS produced more taboo-cheese than Mr. Carpet Carney. Blavatsky wrote in Secret Doctrines: "Lucifer represents life, thought, progress, civilization, liberty, independence. Lucifer is the Logos, the Serpent, the Savior." Nice, huh. Gurdjieff certainly never equivocated like Madame Scrambles. When speaking of his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, G told students: "There is something sinister here." Yes, the Kissing Bandit published. And not one Gurdjieffian on earth today can explain why he salad-shot his ideas over masses of meat-droids, except money. Gurdjieff kept running out of boodle because he spent every bulging box his students handed over, almost the same day, no matter how much it was, on feasting, phuqueing, and fun. G partied like an ancient Roman. The single tired excuse for every abuse the man perpetrated is: teaching by confounding, yet, "Consciously administered wake-ups." Every nasty thing Gurdjieff ever did is glossed over by followers, with the same logic art critics use when Postmodernists exhibit blank canvases. If Gurdjieff had held his mud –– initiated students only –– the Work would be entirely different today, and I wouldn't be writing this because I wouldn't know about it. Instead, G recruited porridge-buzzards and mustashe-ladies with money. If Mister Bon Bon Pockets had held his sacred secrets, all would be different.

Look, some of it helped me, the rest is Magus money grubbing.

One of my best friends, a dear, sweet, caring, kind and generous fellow named Ken Schooner; master of antique furniture refinishing –– having studied for years with a famous refinisher in his 80s –– joined Alex Horn's Group with me. After the Work, for the remainder of his life, no matter what he tried, Ken's psyche slowly unraveled over decades, until he went mad and cut a friend's throat with a linoleum knife, simply because the man asked him to turn down his stereo. The victim barely survived the attack. After a considerable jail sentence, my friend joined the Greek Orthodox church and spent hours collecting grasshoppers in jars. On my last visit, Ken's favorite grasshopper, “Gurdjieff," helped him write a poem for me. A really bad grasshopper poem. Ken died self-medicating. It broke my heart.

Another friend, Larry Treadwell, joined with Ken and me. And like Ken, Larry was just fine before he joined. My friend was beaten, scorned, and humiliated until he left in terrible pain that took over a decade to overcome. In fact, he was so well balanced, his G-muggers couldn't "break" him no matter how hard they tried. Still, after he walked, Larry plummeted into depression and had to crawl out of Hell with no Virgil. One could well argue "that" was the lesson. Don't get involved in cults; at least, after the first disaster, avoid the next one. In a sense, that was my best lesson from being with Alex. Never again did I hang up my common sense and join much of anything. I tried a lot of different therapies, but never followed another person claiming to have "inside knowledge."

In 1967, after I left in disgust, fear, humiliation, depression and anger, I too went crazy. To be fair, I was crazy when I joined. My friends were not. I was. Alex seemed to like me for some reason, never once ripping into me during my year and three months. (One year with Horn equals seven in mutt years.) Perhaps, because I was crazy in a way he enjoyed. I'll never know. The other students, however, smashed me into a bloody pulp. Once out, I was like Black Beard, a violent Alex pirate, hurting people, right and left, everywhere I went. In shame I confess to almost committing a “date rape.” She fought me off and I left, not in shame at the moment, but because I was angry at her for not understanding what a brilliant Gurdjieff student I was. I might have been crazy before the Group, but I was not violent (unless in a blackout). It took decades and a lot of psychiatrists to even begin to deprogram. I'm writing this forty years later.

Another friend, Larry Wiener, an artist with few hang-ups, joined Alex Horn, with his wife Mary. Before joining, Ken Schooner, Larry Treadwell, and myself were "best-beatniks" at their marriage performed by Suzuki Roshi in the Zen Center in San Francisco. After Gurdjieff, they went through a divorce that made the movie, "War Of The Roses," look like a Beatrice Potter story. Larry fell so far he ended up homeless. In the '90s I felt so bad about it, I allowed him to stay in his van behind my studio. What started as a "few weeks" ended seven (very) long years later, like the final show of a bad sitcom. With the help of the San Rafael police, I finally forced Larry to move, after all of my neighbors in the industrial park hated his guts, and mine, and I caught him messing with my truck one day during one of his less than enviable psych-outs. To my best knowledge, Larry has recovered some, and is finally doing better.

My fine friend Mike Kelly worked the door with me at Big Al's nightclub in North Beach for years. After he left the Group, Mike tumbled into a hellish limbo. At 66, he drove a cab in San Francisco, where big city stress finally killed him in cruel increments more brutal than I could bear. If one made the mistake: mentioned G to my late friend, he would shout, "that fin' thief, asshole pig!" and just keep going for twenty minutes.

Mike Benzon, another dear friend, left the Group, then joined another Group founded by followers of Alex in Ft. Collins, Colorado. Decades later, he hates Groups, yet remains obsessed with G ideas. My Group-damaged friends constitute only a few of the people I witnessed have troubles after they left. I know of one couple hurt so badly they will never speak of their experience, or what happened to their children in G, 35 years later.

Understand one thing clearly: A Magus does not care about the trail of wreckage they leave behind them, period. Like multi-national corporations being compared to the traits of psychopaths, "giving a crap" is not in their Job Description. Subjective people are things: chairs, dog houses, potential ranches. So make it about you, for yourself only. Do NOT drag your friends and family into a Magus School because you think it's cool and might help them. Just screw yourself up, and you may end up with self-respect again years after you leave. It's hard to think I brought people in that didn't deserve the abuse. Truly, you will be more than happy to have left your friends and family out of it. It will be the one thing you feel good about for the next two decades.

It is written that Gurdjieff and Ouspensky died transcendental deaths at the level of Socrates. That both Teachers surely live on, in self-created bodies made of psychic-aerosoled hydrogens on their way to the "Sun Absolute." Whew. Because in his William Wegman memento mori, G sure looks like a dead dog to me. Nowadays people are channeling Gurdjieff & Ouspensky night and day. Good. I hope their groveling b.s. drives the two Masters out of their Kesdjan boxer shorts; I mean, giving advice on whether to dump the Econoline for a Mercury Le Saber, or Waldorf vs. Charter, must be worse than counting cracks in a sidewalk.

Gurdjieff 's Work is never done
He busts your ass from sun to sun
And even after he is dead
He squeezes on your tits in bed

In Horn's Group, no cameras allowed! Hey, it's time wires are worn into Gurdjieff Groups to expose them on national television. Just kidding. Well, quite easy actually, and bound to happen sooner or later. All one need do is tell the "screener" they are disappointed in life, feel there must be more, that they read "Miraculous" and "Meetings," and have never been in a Group before, and take no psychiatric meds, and especially how many piles of pesos they rake in every year from their cash taco chain. This can be coached by any number of apostates. Hey, even Gurdjieff's Ghost will help. He loves it. He told me he did the last time we channeled together, last night actually.

Let's start with that Ferragamo clicker Horn dropped like Rosemary's afterbirth on Red Mountain in Sonoma. Man, Robert Burton ran with it, gotta hand him that. I was there. Many were. I was at the beginning for a year and three months. Mr. Appalling came along later and we don't remember him, which he, in proper Magus style, offers as his heftiest sly-PLUS, in that he was so hip, he SUPER-OBSERVED and became a Number Jive Man just by snapping his three brains together. Cool. My hair is off to his Machiavellian move in twisting Alex's Minotaur horns into a Unicorn spike. He sure missed out on the good part, though. I'm telling you, we danced around fires naked and sacrificed a sheep for Passover. A sheep we'd rustled in the middle of the night from some Subjective farmer's field. Ah, those were the days.

Gurdjieffian Magus: sly, astute, foxy, guileful, slippery, crafty, cunning, artful, insidious, vulpine, subtle, tricky, wily, genuinely disingenuous, calculating, unfrank, grifted, subdolous, designing, scheming, dangerous, cagey, devious, shady, shifty, erotic, slick, decisive, divisive, covert, furtive, secretive, stealthy, humorous, riveting, magnetic, underhanded, ruthless, predatory, dishonest, skilled, devising, contriving, quick-taking, silky, haunting, silver tongued, Classics trained, sensate, animalistic, hypnotic, brutal, quote-cribbing, socio-separatist.

The reason why people stay with one is they want to be like them and get all the money, too. Well, to be fair, they stay because all their friends are there, and part of it is really cool, and they don't want to be seen as being weak and giving up.

Gurdjieff Work is not Sai Baba sprinkling thumb-tip ashes like a twelve-year-old magic kid. Hum, Baba likes those, too, we hear. Sigh. In all Groups, there is no doubt that an inner circle forms, sometimes hidden from the rest of the Group. As John Hightower says, “The farther up the pole the monkey goes, the more we see his ugly side.” It's always the four, or nine, or some such "natural" elite that forms via intellectual affinity and some high-ass crotch kissing and butt-naked bucks. The highest usually stays with the Teacher when it all goes to crap. We had one of those. Mike Hilsenrad. Others form their own Groups. The entire worldwide Gurdjieff community is not a community in the usual sense. Reading the same books is all some Groups share. They are much more like "cells" that do not know of each other. Some are well known via internet advertising for students. Most not. You have to hear about them, or be invited.

I mean, tables of higher hydrogens, hot tubs of coffee, barrels of red & white –– low paperbacks, medium paperbacks, high hard-bounds –– Pall Malls, juicy G-ossip; plus all those SLY bobble-head clerks in Field's Bookstore on Polk Street in San Francisco, ringing up each Gurchase, then handing it over with both hands, as if worth ever so much more than the blood you just dripped on their mystic-meat counter for the most impressive, intriguing, air-Guitar instruction booklets you will never figure out in a million years. I washed one hell of a lot of windows to stock my G shelf. At least the resale value on clean returns is good, unless your infantile Hell Witch made you glue construction paper over the covers like some kindergarten kid. The Commentaries alone need cinder block bookends. That's a lot of gluing, but it's important. You never want your Subjective sleeper spouse to see your sacred bullshit. Why? Because if and when they do, they often advise that it seems to them the silliest crap anybody ever heard of. Plus, they can't believe you are giving away the family savings for it. Better dump your sleeper spouse right away. Oh well. Awakening beckons.

A famous G-iggled story concerns G selling "American canaries" that were actually sparrows dyed yellow, in a mysterious marketplace, in the exotic East. Gudents take this as a lesson in SLY. Hey, Sham-balla ain't mysterious no mo, eh. You can see it on your home computer now, from a camera in space. Gurdjieffians "believe" the world is one vast criminal enterprise ... all human beings are criminals ... "even us" ... shocking ... and only after we practice "Intentional Suffering" can we practice “Intentional Crime,” finally grokking just what little sociopathic shit-heels we actually are. Only then, will our three brains finally get together and be worth a bucket of warm spit, well Chardonnay; and since our realization is of the Universal sort, it's objective with an “O” the size of a cOw's. OooooooMoooooo....

At an Alex Horn meeting once, a student asked: "Who is the Devil?" Alex said, "A dwarf who wears striped trousers and uses snuff." We all laughed. It was a cult thing. Sounded right to us.

American Canary Code: We award ourselves official Human Hunting Licenses from the Gnuomras Bait Shop, to fascinate Swami-boys out of their California cobra baskets. And, oh yea, now that I am remembering myself again, my next moves involve your brilliant fiancé. God, she's purty and all mine, sucker; watch me now, I’m going to sleep with her right in front of you. I remember when only lunch was naked. Because if we aren't crazy before we get into it, after –– with a rewired brain –– folks cannot imagine just how naked one's roast beef actually looks. How psyched-out one might become, especially after G-oons body-block one down the stairs; or they "leave" like nearly all eventually DO, with liberal exceptions for the intellectually challenged. Unless, that is, you become yet another art-collecting, brain-stem, penny loafer prick instructing young men how to chew their naked dinner rolls, one hundred times each bite, before swallowing.

Another Gurdjieff Quote:

"A considerable percentage of the people we meet on the street are people who are empty inside, that is, they are actually already dead. It is fortunate for us that we do not see and do not know it. If we knew that a number of people are actually dead and that a number of these dead people govern our lives, we should go mad with horror."

No cigar, really, as Night of the Living Dead comes as no surprise. Not anymore. It worked back then. "BOO!" The quote is a stroke of Magus fear used on students to keep them hooked, attached, and handing over big cash. A Magus is a painter, using people instead of oils. Fear of getting kicked out, or missing your “one” special chance at awakening, Works as a psychic rarefier. Students latch on to its obverse, since they at least are trying to wake up, and hearing it reinforces their desire for: IN Group. I don't care if it's Knights of Pythias, the Elks, or the Lion's Club ... folks are social animals and love grouping.

NOTE: Some tribes are good. If there are any Gurdjieffians out there who don't know this, the Lion's Club raises funds that have helped hundreds of thousands of people keep their eyesight. A gifted visual artist friend of mine, named Walter de Santi, was beaten on the street by thugs causing his retinas to be detached, ending his career. The Lion's Club paid every cent of Walter's eye surgery with no expectation of reimbursement. The bill was huge.

As Gurdjieffians, since you can't be bothered with Subjective dead people, I just thought that in case one of you Unique Buttholes ever has a retina detachment during one of your bogus Group fist fights, and you don't like being blind, you might USE the Lion's Club without mercy if you want to save some scratch. Remember, all sheep are for fleecing. Grab the free money and run, you clever awakening knucklehead you. I honor, most of all, those who stood up and left right in front of us. They were hooted and jeered. Some were beaten with fists and thrown down stairwells. One day on a ranch, I was actually goaded into pretending to butt-hump the man I found most "attractive," a man to this day I sympathize with, not because Marty R. bent over and took it like a repressed bonobo, but because not one of us hollered, ENOUGH!

Well, except me.

"I" left, just not in front of the Group. I didn't want another beating. I slithered.

And yes, I know I should have finished digging that septic tank for Alex. Read it and weep. Students actually followed me and pushed notes under my door. I wanted to spray them with Raid. I moved. I had a psychotic break. Got married. Had another psychotic break. Got divorced ... had another psychotic break, died and was reborn as a name painter. What the hell else could I do? My friend Mike Benzon left nearing the end, when the remaining men decided the only thing to do was have a series of blunt force trauma encounters among themselves to see who could stay. And that's how Alex Horn's original Gurdjieff Group "ended," folks: in a series of hardcore fist fights, over weeks of elimination bouts, winners IN –– losers OUT.

Teachers hate the I.R.S. more than pimps, counterfeiters, and safe-crackers do, put together. They never pay taxes on the cash they rake in, and the I.R.S. is missing out on millions. It's the Number One reason for Gurdjieffian secrecy. Although they are Objective thieves, remember, which makes it okay for them to steal from Uncle Sam. It's a cash business. Gurdjieff ain't no religion. Don't forget to Self-Remember that. It's a School. This is a test. G said men and women are: "Towers of Babble" (no kidding), consisting of hundreds of separate "I's" at odds with each other (WARNING - WARNING - WARNING: proceed here with caution ... Further absorption of this idea might well "I"-bomb your amygdala with a good deal more of a Gnuckle sandwich than you currently think possible. In other words, there is an ancient reason why breaking a mirror brings seven years bad luck. Fine, your choice. Each "I" vying for the stage of the so-called "false personality," to the egregious suffering of the "essence," whatever that might be. That these "I's" come and go, each misrepresenting itself as YOU. Hundreds of them, divide and conquer. Gurdjieff convinced folks they were actually jillions of "I's" & proto-selves. Some ex-Gs handle it okay. I know them too. Martin Van Der Kamp, for one. He loves it, even becoming an appreciator of G's harmonium and playing Muzak for me to grout tile by. And I love music. And I really tried. Sorry. It’s Guzak.

Any so-called awakening that shatters minds like mirrors is best left to the Magus and the Shaman. And you are not a Magus or a Shaman, even if you live in Mill Valley. Standing before a true Magus will shrivel your spleen into bacon crispy. A Magus uses divide and conquer as the shortest route to total freedom (money, sex, power, Oriental carpets, crumpets, strumpets) for them. After you cross their bridge, they close shop and take off in the other direction like the carpetbaggers in Mark Twain. Never give up your common sense, intuition, and reason for anyone else's "truth." Since you are required to make your own truth in the Work anyway, why not actually do that instead of projecting onto a Teacher who is half amazing, half psychic vampire. At least learn to follow your common sense, that still small voice that says, "this is crap ... he/she is in it for the money and sex."

Avoid rules that are not self-imposed.

If you cannot ask questions without being shot down, leave.

Any Gurdjieff idea that cannot be transferred orally, in a circle of quiet discourse with later mentation, using simple, gentle shock exercises and self-observation, is one hundred percent camel shit.

There are hundreds of Gurdjieffians, who upon reading this (which is funny, since most won't), would surely declare that I was never in the REAL Work, because I studied under Alex Horn; and, of course, they declare him NOT a real Teacher. Bullshit. They're full of it. I've thought about it and changed my mind. Actually, the late Alex Horn was more of a Gurdjieffian in one earlobe than all of them put together. Alex was a force of nature. Gurdjieff was a force of nature. And nature is kinky. Most critics never met or Worked with Alex; therefore, with no direct experience, are violating their own G laws. There is not one Gurdjieffian in the world today who could motor their skiff into Horn's harbor and not get Rob Zombied; and probably learn a lot. Those who think Alex was not a true Gurdjieffian simply have not taken a freezing cold look at who Gurdjieff actually was: A violent, manipulating, mystic motherfucker who didn’t give a cold turd about anything except his personal AWAKENING fueled by student money. You can say a lot of things about Alex Horn, and I do, but the man was not asleep. Credit goes where credit's due. And, yes, he loved money. In many ways, his Chief Feature. Horn was a lightning rod. When you hang with an iconoclast, you'll get burned. I'm just another lunch-gut who got hit, and unless fool's fate placed me there at the beginning of Horn's festival of unintentional suffering, for some reason I do not yet understand, I should not have been there at all. At the time I needed sobriety, not to mention serious psychiatric integration from years of child sex abuse, not an atomic "I"-bomb.

I have nothing against anyone who takes any self-absorbed path except suicide bombers; after all, I am a life-long painter, and if a painter is not self-absorbed, then pigs actually do fly.

Gurdjieff is rules and laws. Rules ABOUT laws. In my experience, rules do not awaken. What wakes me up is simply: waking the phuque up! Nothing else. Some simple exercises, that's all.

Rules are Military School.

Rules against personal expression.

Rules against "imagination."

Rules against being black or gay. Yes, some Groups discriminate.

Rules against students meeting outside meetings.

Rules of reporting everything via telephone to someone you do not know: who cannot possibly know you.

Rules that insist you wear certain clothing and chew every bite of food with "Conscious intention."

Rules about your mouth, as in: You have two weeks to get your teeth whitened because I never blow students until their teeth glow like boy-pearls.

No bow-ties. No watches. That's all Trickster crap. Even G, one of the greatest Tricksters to ever grace this planetary gem, did not do that. If your best friend of thirty years takes you to a so-called real G meeting with a so-called real teacher, make sure your Terminator arm has a new fuel cell. Never hookup like I did, not knowing who the hell Gurdjieff even was.

Never listen to a so-called telephone "sustainer." Blow a siren-whistle in the mouthpiece and wake them up.

If you do try a Group, read up and be SLY, for YOURSELF. The older Groupies are snoring, almost every one. They "act" awake, which is another form of sleep they have "graduated" into. You are their new robo-sheep-wakeup-unit. Later you will USE newcomers as your robo-sheep-wakeup-units, shearing off their fluffy wool and eating their lamb chops with mint jelly. Um.

If they say: "You'll die like a dog!" lift your leg and piss on their brogans.

If your so-called Teacher tells you to give them more money than you can afford for hosting a Tupperware party for eight say, or five CDs from the Computer Professor, call the Scooter Store and roll. Especially if you are a millionaire. Because if you are, a Magus will skin you alive. They will tell you that you cannot value what you do not pay for, and since you have millions you need to pay BIG. Bull-fuckin'-shit. The teacher wants a new car, okay. Did the Apostles have Amex?

If you answer an ad, and they ask if you have read about them on the NET, hang up the phone. They are manipulators who will squash you like a potato bug.

Over time, G ears clog with Subjective wax. We're spies, remember, which leads to self-centered impaction of more than ear canals. Think: very hard arteries in people with less compassion than a wolverine taking out a fly fisherman. At least the wolverine runs up to Eddie Bauer and rips his throat out first.

Gs rarely respond to critics. Why would they? To come out of personal hiding would be to actually engage Subjectives, for them, the horror of all horrors. They're stuck in Goodoo up to their slies. Objectives can't reason with Subjectives because sleepers don't understand elite intellectual magicians. Imagine Orage teaching the Law of Seven to Gomer Pyle.

If they say: "We are THE Conscious School," call Yellow Cab. If they say: "We are just a little PREP School" (as G did), get on your stick-horse and gallop. Their little "prep" School has probably been slumming off newcomers for forty years.

A Gurdjieff spouse begins (usually quite early) to see how his/her partner is a sleepwalking duffas. It's like racism. Call it "sleepism." We are cool awakeners. Everybody else, including the spouse, is the OTHER: "Hi honey ... I'm home! And I'm dumping your ass today to get it over with now, right in the beginning. Sure, we had a terrific marriage, but baby you don't want no mystic lessons at all. You can keep the kids, I just want the car."

Divorce is common. Even demanded at times by some asswipe "teachers."

ESSAY ASSIGNMENT:
Due Monday / What Happens
When The Work Goes Wrong?

Gurdjieff Work is serious psychological reorganization at depth. You don't know how, or if, you will heal after your brains are shattered and glued back together by people who have no right in this world to do that to anyone, not just you. For sure, never, ever, let some gang of Guppies, out for a little Synanon encounter fun, circle you chanting: "gooble-gobble, gobble-gooble, we will make you one of us." Just haul off and kick the nearest idiot in the balls as hard as you can and run for your car. Taser the Teacher. Carry a CS canister and use it while bolting backwards out the door.

If your "Master" ever sucker-punches you in the stomach, wait until he/she's off your case, then return the favor with brass knuckles in the face. A Magus never calls the cops. Never go to your first few months of meetings alone. Join up with a sumo. If they won't let you join with a sumo: DON'T. If they will, witness for each other. Then if anyone beats the crap out of you, walk out of the meeting, cellphone 911, wait for the Subjective cops, and herd those stupid cop-sheep back into the meeting and swear out a sumo-witnessed formal complaint for Conscious assault and battery. The teacher will make bail the same night, and the entire "School" will disappear the next day; however, you will have bummed their evening, and there's something to be said for that. Plus, the teacher will then be wanted by the police. Not that he/she isn't already, but every little bit helps. It is said that everybody in the Work eventually "falls" (sooner than later), that is: has a group experience and finally sees themselves as others see them. Followed by becoming their own negative "enemy," the same way they see "mechanical humanity." It's mystical mirrors, but it Works great on people suffering modern angst, who need to dig in the dirt because their intellect is driving them crazy and they need to first "locate their body in time and space" using a shovel; then go out and get laid like never before, a lot, thus balancing the three brains: Intellectual, Emotional, and Crotch.

Namasté
Motherfucker

A Gurdjieff shunning has the effect of turning one completely invisible. When I did it to others, I called it: Work. When others eventually did it to me, I called it: "the shuffle-muffle," or something; I know I had a name for it. I felt ashamed for having done it to others. I remember in a San Francisco Safeway once, looking up to see a woman I had been close to in the Group, and she simply could not see or hear me due to her superior status. I had done the same. These living-dead were pervasive because the "prep School" I was in had three hundred students, at one point. As an exile, running across them was not uncommon. As I galloped, I got the same mummy-mug I no doubt gave others before I left. Gurdjieff Work teaches out-and-out heartlessness. At least admit that for Christ Absolute sake. We carried it like vise-grips in our amoral tool-belt. If a student got booted (in order to spread terror through us Sunday fainters), the rest of the mob, me included, jeered like slavering jackals — until before leaving, I finally stopped jeering from shame. I was "waking up." Others went quietly, though just as melodramatically; because we loved them so much, we couldn't jeer.

Don't worry, be happy, Gurdjieff will never die.

In 2005, G has finally become nothing less than George Ivanovitch Einstein. This is America, not Kurdistan. Nowadays G is a full-blown cultural "I"con. Coming soon to a boutique near you: Gurdjieff wearing eyeball-spring glasses on G-shirts.

No?

Oh yea.

After leaving my forehead-monster back along the trail of broken dreams, it was like walking around with someone else's mental illness. Jeeze. I had my own, which was bad enough. Gurdjieff is not some box of frozen veggies like Deepak Chopra, or any other awakening you ever careened into a tree before, no matter how bad that may have been, even if you got diddled by Dicktananda. When the Work goes wrong, it eviscerates self-respect, common sense, and reason — all while warping good will into philosophically sanctioned AIM-making misdemeanors and other crimes. Never let yourself be manipulated, ever, through fear of not getting in, or leaving. Then you know instantly that you are in the wrong room.

If any person gets humiliated and kicked out, leave the meeting with them and go have coffee together. That person probably has a lot on the ball — and the Teacher realizes they are beginning to see through the b.s. Teachers have a keen sense of exactly when to boot the next sucker out for the best dread result. Have several cups of strong coffee with your new friend and wake each other up. A lot of seeker-somethings embrace Gurdjieff ideas like widows reading supermarket romance novels. It's musketeer meets maiden on horseback in twilight with gold, fire-sticks, feasting, tobacco, booze, broads and bad boys. The typeset evokes wanderlust, burning punk, yak butter tea. Just chuck the ancient wisdom of the Middle East at the meeting room door. Cover your ASP. Be ready to strike. If you like American Idol, you will love Gurdjieff. Imagine your boss is Simon Cowell and you work for him seven days a week. For years. Cards up, Gurdjieff is a bait and switch with a brilliant bait and a dark switch. The warnings –– if you get any these days, which you probably do not –– are bum because one cannot possibly imagine the changes that will come into their life as a result of being mangled by arse-holes.

Gurdjieff enjoyed the finest, even during times of war. Nazis were stalking the streets of Paris, yet G's larder was stocked with everything from roasted witchity grubs, to crab cake Rangoon's, and frozen girl-milk, you know, with chocolate covered flies. I mean, Gurdjieff had cheeses made from the pupae of select Chinese butterflies, canned sex organs of rare starfish, preserved probosci of anteater (with fire ant garnish), harmonium cake, even shoepick de garliqué. Ah, fresh manash-potat with cutcut-purrie. Oh yea, and pickled squirrel eggs. Lots and lots of pickled squirrel eggs in Mobster Sauce. Even mockingbird chimichangas, for crap sake.

Fine, you are accepted by a Teacher (on review) after some rigamarole, grilling, including a telephone friend (sustainer) to keep you on KEY through octaves of asleep-at-the-wheel skidding during your flatland pay job, and begin Working toward becoming a "Numbered Man," that is: from brainy ditch-digger to "Esoteric Christ Absolute."

Secretly, of course.

Another reason for secrecy is: say Homer Simpson has you over for barbecued squirrel eggs with manash-potat and canary chips, and you happen to let it drop that you think Marge's hair looks like some bouffant cartoon, you come off lower than mildew. Talking about what you are doing outside the Work breeds incredulous reactions. They don't want that happening because you might start thinking for yourself again, and then they'd lose your cash donations. "They know not what they do," is an example of a redefined scripture, used as an "Esoteric" logging-wedge between: Work Group / world-at-large.

Us & Them.

Gurdjieffians do not "believe" the way others do. They Work toward self-made immortality through cigarettes. Hey, fine. Who cares if they don't believe in "belief." Come on, "not believing" is just another belief. Gurdjieff said the Universe is 100% material, that by eating "higher hydrogens," one can sort of aerosol coats of ionized gas into their insides to make an astral body, called "the body Kesdjan." Alex Horn told us he chain-smoked Pall Malls because "tobacco contains higher hydrogens needed to grow a soul!"

The Work's darkest side is: "inner-fascism" toward one's negative "I's." Students end up hating "sleep" in themselves and others. The problem: "hate" in any form is the worst negative emotion of all: blocking all chance of Work, or so it is claimed. G comes complete with a promise of the Inner Circle of Humanity sending "C" (Conscious) influences into the outer reaches of mechanical doggie hell, where us sleeping K9s are messing up the world; and the "Inner Circle of Humanity" never sends any negative influences because THEY are Objective, loving beings at the level of Abraham, Christ and Mohammed, which is why those religions all get along so well today.

"Conscious" men and women, with extra assorted rascals, including a seminal list of very high order GIPs, mostly men, are trotted out to show how HIGH the Teacher must be. See it. The elbows they claim to rub are embarrassing. There is not one among them, including Gurdjieff himself, fit to sweep the porch of those they claim to represent. They don't have enough GNA in their skin-tags to stand in the shadow of Pythagoras. The man would have sent one of his lesser students out to run them off with a Golden Mean cattle-prod.

Another notion: so-called psychic "buffers" keep us from cracking up, while protecting our "essence" from hard knocks. We supposedly need buffers to walk around with polarities, i.e., sub-personalities, yet they screw up our inner Work because they keep the so-called "essence" too buffered, thus: foiled from almost all authentic root expression. Could be right, so what. The Work you have to do is not good for most. Gurdjieff Work should be in small groups of carefully screened folks.

Gurdjieff said his Work had ancient roots –– which means it must be wonderful, right?

Ancient: Good.

Modern: Bad.

Sarmoung Scroll: Good.

Computer Scroll: Bad.

G said his presentation was new, and that the way he put it together had never been done before. He stressed how impossible it all was: how one must have the right Teacher, and one must do exactly as the right Teacher instructs. For this you get to blood-blister your hands and feet all day and night while your teacher drinks Benedictine and Brandy and sexes up their students. I don't know about you, but I just love sacrificing my money and life to Super Special Assholes so they can have all the fun. How in hell could anyone find the "right" Teacher and Group in this mess, which by violating oral teaching, Gurdjieff degraded himself? There you are in your Group (the elite on earth with a slim chance at Esoteric Heaven), slying-around, "externally considering," recruiting new people in ways that, when you strike up a conversation in Café de la Phuqué Ewé, you listen and respond from "School." It's what the Children of God called "flirty fishing," only without the blow job. Well, usually without the blow job. Shame on them. The least they could do is blow everybody equally.

Later, you are home for Thanksgiving with your sleeping loved ones and your heart bleeds with "Conscious" caring for them, because they will probably never find this miraculous Work that you have found, and you can't tell them about it (sob), or explain the TRUE meaning of Esoteric Christmas; therefore, mom & dad will be eaten by the moon and crapped out at the level of the minerals, and there you sit at their table, "knowing" a lot about everything, forcing yourself to feel lower than them just to seem "equal."

It's okay. You're just nuts from not shooting the curl soon enough, that's all.

Gowabunga!

Thank you G, for the "I-balls" to see you with. And thank you for the poise to duck your pies. And thank you for the GREAT lesson you provided by skidding your Citroen into that tree.

Gurdjieff renamed the mystic world with about fifty or sixty, perhaps one hundred, jargon words –– nothing wrong there –– except after I left, the jargon cursed my life with the torments of Job. Because, you see, every one of those words is full-term, conjoined-twins-pregnant with levels of meaning, exercises, mentation. Look rube, we are privy to the most ancient, Esoteric Christian Secrets of the Universe in the lives of men and women. Well, okay, not exactly secret anymore since Gurdjieff decided to give away the Sarmoung Brotherhood, over the Parable of the Happy Meal, in some pre-war McDonald's, to Ouspensky, who after years ended up splitting from G and dying a lonely paranoid, living in Hell Absolute.

Other than that, Super Size me. What I am saying is, the first good "shots" of awakening at the beginning: Self Remembering / Split Attention –– IS IT. With some other good things, all of which can be gotten from G's books. Split your attention and split. Gurdjieff said Self Remembering was only the beginning. He needed money for squirrel eggs, remember. Don't let them blow your brain into ten thousand unconnected "I's", then refinance your mortgage. Split attention is the same as Thich Nhat Han's "Mindfulness." A much healthier approach. Mindfulness means washing dishes (not dishwashing) while actually: WASHING DISHES. This cannot be done without split attention. Case closed.

Gurdjieff would have you washing dishes, while standing on one foot, tapping logarithms backwards with the other. Gurdjieff was: THE MAN. He got writers, musicians, photographers, accountants, biographers, cooks, coffee-runners, housekeepers, groundskeepers, artists in residence, massage therapists, even Fritz the Boy Wonder. In short, all the things a Magus pulls in with their psychic drag-net, on the one hand, fear and Trickster humor on the other; at least seven Master-rambles up the alpha pyramid, that is: Conscious One about town, all donated and controlled, along with plenty of gold bars, coins, watches & chains, gems, cameos, oil paintings, temple prostitutes, Persian Polident (with ooze control), ivory dildos, magical broaches, ancient talismans, rare medications, jade pipes, opium balls, Tibetan turquoise, Tijuana velvet paintings, African masks, goose-bear lozenges, Viking beads, Ionic Breeze machines with patented Zenion technology, bolts of silk, Russian sable brushes, crystal carvings, gold inlaid bone buttons, Egyptian embroideries, chod bowls, crystal yantras, lava-lamps, meteorite yakshas, manuscripts, parchments, not to mention a fine tailor, doctor, bail bondsman, and dentist. Let's hear it for the Magus!

Here's how it could happen: You're lurching down Market Street one morning humming, "Life Is But A Dream, shaboom, shaboom," on your way to your dead-end cubicle feeling "what's the use," and run into an old friend you really care about who tells you over coffee, in so many words, that you only think you know what's really going on, and rather mysteriously challenges you to check out an introductory Gurdjieff meeting, where you'll be free to ask all the questions you want, no pressure. And you're a "seeker-something" (who isn't?) ... out for a little quintessential truth, eh: Esoteric Good News.

There is only one reason for recruiting new blood: money for the teacher. Think about it. A Magus has nothing to gain from your "enlightenment." Only their own. They need money for this. Your "perhaps" friend even says to think of it as "your meeting," which is another "sly," since no meeting is ever "yours" unless you're the Teacher. And you think you're pretty cool, so you drop in to check it out, and while you're there some gell-butchie with fried-egg-tits tells you to shut the phuque up; but you stay, for some reason, and practice a couple of simple exercises, and see yourself as quite phony. This may or may not be true. Still, nothing shines brighter than a self-interrogation spot. And you don't like what you see in yourself, and you want to change, and you feel especially devastated to "understand" what a cobbled together "Rube Goldberg machine" you are told you are, so much so, that (SWITCH) you are told you need other self-diagnosed Rube Goldberg machines, called students, also seeking to awaken, in the School composed of other Seekers of Esoteric Truth, shocking each other awake, which you are told you cannot do on your own, because no matter how many alarm clocks you set, you will soon go back to sleep and not hear them anymore, therefore, forget to remember Self-Remembering.

So you join a Group of students dedicated to waking each other through shocks. See, right there, psychic hand grenades can outright destroy some lives. Powder-monkeys love it because they get to jump around a lot and prime the cannons. This is where you'll need your canister of CS gas. If you are being hurt in a "G" Group, get out of there fast. I imagine it's hard enough to face your demons in a quiet study Group. The Work is Alfred Hitchcock dark, "murder by a babbling brook," that sort of thing. Lucifer the Light Bringer ... Morning of the Magicians ... the Dawn of Man. Or as Gurdjieff proposed in one of his first recruiting pamphlets: Herald of the Coming Good. Magick. That's fine if you want it. If you don't want it, and don't quite understand what you are getting into, it can end up a misery like no other. Gurdjieff said: "Man, as he is, is nothing more than a cork floating on top of a stream. The Real Objective Truth is that all of humanity is nothing much more than a blade of grass or a leaf on a tree."

ALL OF HUMANITY, for the love of Three Stooges, that is simply nihilistic beyond measure, really. I mean, talk about abject hopelessness as a motivator. Don't do it unless you're sure you want to evolve yourself into: "A GOD," thereby escaping the cosmic conveyor of factory funerals. That's like telling a rock climber: "See that pinnacle over there. It's never been conquered. Over two thousand climbers have been killed trying. Your chances of making it are less than theirs." And the rock hound starts packing because she figures, if that many died before her, then her chances must be better than excellent. With G it's like: "wow, a shot at being the one Charlie Tuna in ten million who escapes the net and actually achieves higher water ... just think ... why ... I could hang with Jesus on Titan. Hey, I could BE Jesus on Titan. Hey, I could be Jonathan Livingston Tuna in Modesto!"

They tell you the world is strewn with dying dogs who attempted the "Work of Works," and your chances are less than theirs, and you climb the dang pinnacle and fall off. Strange smart-apes we. Thinking in fact, precisely BECAUSE the odds are so bad, we, individually have a better chance. Vegas runs on this brilliant truth. A DNA quirk? Hey, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Bullshit it does. I’m talking, and so are others now. Check the NET — they tell you to never do ... try: Rick Ross and key in "Gurdjieff" for reports of damaged students in their own hand. You see, a Magus "Works the quirks," knowing the less chance a person has of actually getting something big, the harder they will Work: to never get it. This may be a vestige from hunting and gathering times, when it meant absolute survival to keep-on-keepin'-on. Flash Forward to Ralph's delivering hot meals and forget hunting and gathering. Only the smart-ape brain is still wired for it. And after a rain, there's that smell in the rising steam evoking wanderlust. When you describe mechanical humanity: (dressed in "Objective sorrow and suffering for sleeping humankind") as a cork on a stream, you are not a person with the high aim of helping others awaken from the tedious hypnosis of social activity and hive living. You are a person who scares people out of their money, an ancient GRIFT for sure.

What is astonishing to me is, after folks are kicked out, that at least one student does not go back and take out the Group with a Super Soaker full of liquid dog shit. Fontainebleau Columbine.

Since Gurdjieff said higher Consciousness was only for the minuscule few, he must have been awake enough to know that this special knowledge was wrong for release into mass culture where it would be profaned and hurt thousands of people. He didn't care. This was all about fundraising through the "Trick of Two": Acceptance / Fear. A Magus plays the two off against each other to make FRICTION, because friction is where the money and action are. Ask yourself this: was it Objective Compassion that released Gurdjieff's writings, by himself and many others (in direct opposition to ancient ORAL traditions), to be misunderstood and profaned? We Work hard though, sacrificing for the Magus ... the Work. You've got to hand us that. When we go for it, we "sacrifice" a lot. For instance, I took everything I owned except clothes and shoes, etc., took it to a flea market at the Cow Palace in San Francisco and sold my entire childhood collection of fantastic art from around the world, to pay Alex Horn who used it to support his Gal-coholism. You figure if you try real hard, even if you don't make Esoteric Christian status, at least all your Work will have made you a better, "more Conscious" person.

Hanging around for months on end will not make you any more Conscious than the first exercises you did that woke you up to begin with. Look in the personals section of city newspapers. Masochists always WAY outnumber sadists. Always. Your poor-in-spirit heart is ashamed, in need of much correction. And even if you ever did attain "higher Consciousness," according to The Lord of the Slies, you'd be one in ten million. Let's hear it for brain spanking. Glotto players love it.

Not only that, after all is said and done, you likely will have mistreated your spouse, children, brothers, sisters, friends, poodle, and goldfish, plus given quite a lot of your money, sweat, and time to the "Work" for pretty much nothing in return. You certainly will never end up a Number 5 or 6 "Man." So far, every Teacher claiming numbered status is an obvious fraud. They tell you, "Higher people don't go around proving it! They don't have to!" Hey, Gurdjieff didn't exactly drive his Citroen through that tree. Suddenly seeing yourself as other people truly see you, and have always truly seen you, is bad enough. I mean, people who have been unhappily going about their day job with the self-awareness of a house cat (which is purrty good by the way), suddenly find themselves "... walkin' on golden slivers ..." and even twenty seconds of this SEEMS worth twenty years of struggle, except most people simply cannot take a full-out assault on their Swinger personalities. It's nothing new. Fundamentalist Christians admit that their worst defect is, and I quote: "shooting our wounded." The whole mess is almost impossible to explain. Nobody has that much time. And dang it all anyway, you did get something from it. Of course, as mentioned, you could have gotten a lot from an Amtrak derailing. And you could have found "self-awareness" from any number of meditation courses. COMMON SENSE: our most faithful Steward, we ignore, while manipulation and con, we buy. Why?

Ask Dr. Gil Roberts, climber of Mount Everest on the National Geographic Expedition, a great guy who challenged Alex to a duel for screwing his wife after Gil had given the man untold wealth.

I couldn’t figure out why Alex liked me so much. Never have. Once at a banquet on the Feather River, I went into an alcoholic blackout and crashed over the table to fight Gil Roberts (who won the fight, by the way) and got kicked out of the group. When I showed up at the next meeting, Alex winked at me and said, “Welcome back.” Weird. I had no money. Well, I could sing. Alex had me doing songs like, “Dear Old Buffalo Boy” at weddings, etc. That must be it.

G professed the most bizarre flap-doodle to come down the line since the first red-assed confidence clown declared the end of the world was coming on Friday afternoon at 2:43, so you'd better get your act together and give all your wine, nuts, honey, and fruit preserves to ME, because I'm the only Gidiot that can save you. Oh, and don't forget your youngest daughters. Actually, I'll take all of your daughters except the lesbian with the wooden leg.

It's as ridiculous as Blavatsky touting "Kut Humi" as her personal representative of the ancient "Ascended Masters," while claiming him to be the reincarnation of both Pythagoras and Saint Francis. Oh sure, that must be true. After all, old Humi "materialized" letters from the spirit world just for her –– through outright fraud, by retiring to her room and writing Kut's "spirit notes" herself. There's something desperately Nora Desmond about that girl that makes my skin crawl. The real SHOCK is that people actually believed her and still do. It seems Pythagor-sissi mostly wrote Fatassky's followers, asking them to give her lots of money. And they DID! An excellent argument for psychiatric meds.

Nowadays, even before people hear about "Work," it is as if they already have psychic receptor sites for it: digital dendrite cookies awaiting one command stroke at the right moment, and click: two weeks later their entire library is in boxes and they've sold the bedroom set. And I'm talkin' receptor sites the size of the nipples on the Grand Tetons, that decades earlier rejected UFO abductee meetings, said no thanks to Jehovah Witnesses, Scientologists, LifeSpringers, Forumites, Mary Kay, and Thelema; yet, by way of Gurdjieff's flash-forward into "Self-Remembering," it's as if a string of psychic pop-beads closes, then on through years of concentric circling toward the ultimate, whispered: Inner Circle Of Humanity, until finally, reaching the very "Well of the Work" itself (yea, I know, a deep subject for a shallow guy like me).

Your big WIN: the Six Dollar Burger for $3.95. Talk about bunion grim. The sin is not getting fleeced. The sin is not facing up to getting fleeced. We're: IN. The whole rest of the world: OUT? Hey, Gashole, get out of the group –– you put a question mark after that, get out! Hey, you sure cuss a lot ... why? Fuck you, poofter! You're out of the Group! Get the fuck out and never come back or I’ll break your face with a cinder block! Well, shiver me timbers young Jim'arkins and please forgive me sins. Can I stay if I do five thousand psychic push-ups and promise to kidnap Santa Claus next December for the Feather River Winter Camp? I see clearly now, you must be right because you cuss like a roustabout on Carnivale and, well, because you just damn well fan your peacock feathers right out there and say so. Good enough for me. Yep. You just say so, dang it. Finally, I see now how you are charged to carry the elite wisdom of the ages because, well, you rejected certain things yesterday, then turned around and accepted them all today, but especially how you put down your silver fork every single time you chew.

Fine, I'm channeling Kut Humi tonight and telling. All of it.

Added Boner Feature:

A ROBERT BURTON
REPORT FROM KABUL

One day some Magus-tripping Gurdjieff "student" sent me an e-mail from Afghanistan I thought must be a put-on of some sort. 2004 I think. I don’t know. I figured it was the FBI updating my file again. The sender said every word was direct from an official, student eyes only, monthly note-sheet, purporting it to be the actual words of G-penis, Robert Burton. Evidently they had picked up his newsletter while kicking around the weekly goat-testicle-meeting at Saturday Market in Kabul. And, they were actually requesting my comments on it because I’d shot my wad off about Gurdjieff in this stupid article, and they wanted more. I also figured it could be from Burton himself, as a joke. You know, what do you do after you collect all those paintings and sculptures? Collect more? Or goad some ex-guppies for a few laughs between giving conscious blow jobs and kicking people out for waking up. So I e-mailed back, hoping to give the Feds, or R, or both, a bit of sizzle-frival, completely forgetting the impossibility of either of them grokking the ravings of the Central Casting "G" Type I am, which is: Lunatic Type, not to mention bum and tramp.

"Lunatics", said Mr. Ouspensky, "are like politicians, people who think they can do, people who think that they can change life by means of themselves, people who, if they put their theories into practice, create greater disorder because they do not calculate Second Force. (Oooo, Second Force, all bow before the Queen.) This means that they think they can change everyone by some new enactment and do not realize that to change a person is a very difficult thing. These are the Lunatics, and again, they do not see the fool in themselves."

Oh really. I see it alright. The King has me in his court for just that reason. I make him laugh at himself.

Hubris, always my strong suit.

You mean Lunatic Type like Gurdjieff, himself? I assume Ouspensky included himself in my G category too, since the man went completely mad and died a terrible paranoid death from giving away his life to an amoral man who used him like a box of Kleenex for writing and publishing secrets G was never supposed to reveal. No wonder Gurdjieff and Ouspensky produced so many sociopathic teachers without a single hint of shame, kindness, caring or concern for the people they stomped into the dirt and left in the road behind them. Oh, b.s., Davy ... calm down. Breathe. Your case worker will get upset and take away your shapes-tray again. Remember how you were just in another bipolar swamp that day? not to be sucked with –– otherwise you might have dumped the e-mail from Kabul with your other spam? You are not a Lunatic Type, Davy, not at all. You are officially mentally ill, remember? After you left Gurdfjieff behind along the trail of lost men, and got diagnosed by Doktor Doomphobia, and he put you on lithium and Prozac? Remember how your kids had to pull you out of the woods that day, talking to a boulder? And the boulder was talking back? In iambic pentameter? How you were hallucinating the little people on the Doktor's face and screamed when his receptionist walked in? How you thought he was Belfegore in drag?

Fine, the truth will out.

The e-mail claimed Burton wrote: The mechanical I's represent chaos: the work I's represent harmony.

I thought, sure, get lost in your I's for me please, so “I” can continue vacuuming up the rest of your dead mother's money.

Over the years, I had received a lot of godforsaken Burton-dirt from folks that claimed they were there at his infamous Ranch, then left in abject depression, broke, broken, angry and extremely vengeful. They wanted the man’s elderly balls staked to the walls of their cave apartments for Christmas decorations. Then too, Robert and I were together in Alex’s group so hey, I really got "into it" that day, yep, just went for the neckulars. Just laid back blurting my tonsorials out, and those b-oysters had been yanked by Doktor Torquemada when I was fine. I couldn’t help myself though. Never could. Of course, I didn’t know Robert during "who's got the biggest swinging-dong competition" on Red Mountain. Nobody did. The Group was huge. Well, and Robert had already mastered the ancient art of magick invisibility, thus giving him the opportunity of self-remembering himself while remembering he was, without any of us however, remembering him. Cool move. Bingo!

Number Jive man.

Burton said this? I doubt it. This has to be the FBI: In relation to rearranging one's thinking to bring one closer to consciousness, I noticed that my queens were about to express self-pity, and I said "Stay in the Kings."

I thought, man, that tops Long Dong Silver. Arrrrrg! We should go out tonight Bobby, full-moon-it so to speak, you know, gig us up some bullfrogs, have a fire, gobble legs, melt up some smoores, then pee our names together on the pond-bank, okay? Five merit badges for one event! Five apiece!

Then Burton supposedly said: Give the queen an inch, and it will take a mile.

I thought, oh shit, that means four and a half inches is too short. I’m screwed. Oh well.

I love this one, and I believe Bobby did say this one, for sure: If one uses the TWELVE mechanical intellectual parts of centers correctly, they produce the conscious world twelve.

Jesus H. Cripe!

Because ... now the student has TWELVE (count them) “mechanical” Intellectual parts to drive them crazy, on top of the twelve non-mechanical ones already orphaned in their Gurdjieff gland. Okay, do I have to explain everything? This is a Mighty Morphin’ Magus move. He's acting as absentee landlord for gullible psyches or my name ain’t Yosemite Sam. Buy into this one and you just rented a brown recluse web for your next apartment. A magician opens free space in “baby-brains” slicker than geeks do with extra server-space. It’s lesser-magus-magick to “charm” you, then it’s the whole Intifada sucker, wallet, carpentry skills, inheritance, talents, loyalty, trust, ranch, home, cow, geese, children, wife, except the lesbian with the wooden leg, your dog, plus every speck of true pride you ever cobbled together in your rooster-tail existence, not to mention dad's Mercedes. Ah yes ... the coffers of Kings and Queens.

Robert Burton said?: We urgently need to dispel imagination and to be present to each other.

I shit you not. Especially you. Beware of all the warnings about imagination being bad. Perhaps Robert, as played by the FBI, means a different sort of imagination than the painters used to create all the artwork he paid millions for? Especially that painting Burton has of an Angel with a hard-on. Gurdjieff had an incredible imagination, which he used to amass a fortune and live for decades as Cock on the Dunghill. Alex Horn hated “imagination” in us students, then used it himself every day. After all, Mr. Diabolically Yours wrote truly “imaginative” stage plays that left every audience pondering, what the fuck was that? Could Alex Horn really be that bad a playwright?

Then, supposedly, which I seriously doubt: When one is present, one has solved the mystery of the universe: to produce conscious beings.

I get this one! "Being present,” as when getting a blow job from your teacher!

And this?: I am more grateful for my students' gift than my own, for what is one compared to thousands?

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your grappa grow? With twinkle bells and cockle smells, and pretty boys all in a row. Oh please, and gobs of gay-fabulous paintings? I will never believe Robert Burton said that, in writing or otherwise. Naw, he did.

Or this: From fairest creatures we desire increase ... that we use our physical bodies to produce our astral bodies.

If Robert Burton said that, G bless him. I weep for his loss, and thank you Rick Ross, now down on your knees and diddle the boss.

Robert Burton said?: Because of the relative difference between the second state and the first state, people do not even suspect that they are asleep.

No kidding, Karl G-ung, which is exactly the lesser-magick a Magus employs to make millions off his followers for buying up painted masterpieces he claims belong to the “Work”, while ever demanding more cold cash & hot sex. Gurdjieff said, “I sheer sheep.” This can only be gotten away with so long before a great chorus of baaaas rises over the vineyards.

Then?: Through religion, man has created an imaginary picture of his life after death.

And Gurdjieff offers, let's see, a shimmering ether-bod of aerosolized hydrogen's bug-splattered over some interior “imaginary” lattice of false hopes and night terrors, all for the God they are becoming? Whew. Make sure you get your left shoe on the right foot when you boogie out the backdoor of that sugar-shack.

This cannot be Burton: (Upon passing a cemetery:) I looked at the gates of the cemetery, and for a moment, in a flash, I saw that for us they are the gates to Paradise.

Dungeons and Dragons?

Stop Robert! Never admit you said this next one. Well, you no doubt never did: Although the opportunities to judge life are endless, why waste one's time judging people who are wasting their time answering your supposed questions, like Dave the Lunatic Tramp?

Hey, pay no attention to the snuff-snorting dwarf in striped trousers hiding behind the Royal ass.

He never said this for sure: Ouspensky survived the death of his physical body. He became the "flame that needs no fuel."

Okay, gloves off, do we get Hieronymous Bosch & Lomb aviator goggles, or bring our own? Can I earn a pair for doing the best loop-de-loops over Mona Kea in full eruption? Actually, Ouspensky went stark raving mad toward the end, writhing in paranoia, finally imploding into one final frozen heap of psychic-snow-peas when he “woke up” and realized he’d just spent the bulk of his precious life, money, skill, and trust, glorifying an uncaring Magus who only used him as his Scribe, thus ripping off yet another human life. Poor elderly Ouspensky on crutches and drugs must have zombified-out years before he gave up and traded in his donkey for the Grief of All Griefs. No, this e-mail from the Middle East had to have been another swishing expedition from the tax wasting FEDS.

Hold up there, pilgrim. Robert did have his secretary call you around a year ago, (2008) several times, remember? Asking if you could remember the location of the Victorian house in San Francisco where Alex had us all hopping around the room (his words): hoochie-koochie dancing, molding, floating, flying, and radiating, not to mention braying like boozed bonobos, yowling like Sphinx cats, and barking like elephant seals on Ano Nuevo Island. Man oh woman, those were important Gurdjieff exercises, for sure. The morning I started with Alex Horn on Sterling Benell’s ranch on Sonoma Mountain Road, neighboring Gurdjieff teacher, Robert de Ropp, on his way to his Zen garden, took two of us aside and warned: “If you sup with the Devil, have a long spoon.” The Victorian? I confess to wondering at the time, not for very long however, why the hell Robert Burton wanted to know where that house was? And why he didn’t just call me himself? I don’t bite, physically. Plus, I am loved by movie and rock stars, writers, poets, painters, standup comedians the world over who call me when they’re down and need a good laugh. At least the Federal Bureau of Investigation usually has the good manners to drop by the studio for personal interviews. In fact, the last one (before my Kabul communiqué) had the decency to bald-face lie to me during a jam-packed searchlight opening of my (even if I do say so myself, and, I do) amazing paintings, telling me he was my biggest fan ever; then inviting himself over to my secret-bunker studio so I could teach him how to paint a tact-squad on glass, while he checked the place out for revolutionary techniques. Yep, Special Agent, Ed Davis, left that day after a very enjoyable visit, went back to the Federal Office Building in San Francisco and actually painted a tact-squad glass-painting as a gift for me. Cool beans. Then Ed delivered it by hand in a "surprise" drop-by two weeks later. Not only that, the man has evolved into a really good painter now. A famous artisté, producing silhouette cops better than any I have ever seen. I love his new work. But I, international celebrity painter that I am, hold the unique privilege of owning Ed’s very first endeavor. Eat your heart out, Robert Burton. I especially love it in the corner of the frame where Ed signed: To Dave Archer, with many thanks for the TIPS! Now, ya’ gotta love that. (Come on Ed, I kid, okay?) Still, if I were you, I’d check out Robert Burton next time instead of me because that guy has a collection of paintings that museums worldwide would not only give their double-fuzz-nuts for, they’d throw in five Dave Archer's to go with them. And talk about some true super-decor to complement your Ikea collection. Just think of the chicks man. The chicks!