Chaos Rising

I mentioned it yesterday and I shall wax on more about it today. Robert Anton Wilson has died. While this has happened before, the results seem a bit more verifiable this time around. Old Bob has not surfaced to reassure friends that some paper made a mistake in running his obituary.

My wife comes home from school yesterday and tells me that as part of her class, they all went around the room with introductions stating name, age, and religion. She declared herself Discordian. Usually such a proclamation requires quite a bit of follow up. Most people have never heard of this joke posing as a religion cum religion posing as a joke. But on this day a person in an earlier class had also announced himself as a Discordian. His roommate made him a Pope (Spectacles, Testicles, Brandy, Cigar, You are now all Popes as well) and told him he would never meet another Discordian. An obvious lie since later that day he in fact met another Discordian. Not only that but he need do little more than Pope somebody (as I just did to all of you) and he would know another Discordian. The poor kid had never heard of Robert Anton Wilson, so my wife threatened him. He had until the end of the quarter to read some RAW or she would excommunicate him. When all of this transpired, neither of us had any idea that old Bob had snuck out before breakfast.

Then I found out, blogged it, and went to work. As lunch approached at work, someone inquired if I would like a hot dog for lunch. Hail Eris! I ate a foot long coney dog with so much crap smothered on it had to blaspheme against religions we don't even know about yet. While not a Friday, it still felt right.

After work a group of us went to the Pub at the End of the Universe to drink some pool and shoot some beer, or something like that. There I got my group of people who had never heard of the guy to toast Robert Anton Wilson. Or maybe they offered cheers to the fact that after five minutes the crazy guy had stopped ranting about some dead writer they had never heard of.

I have twenty of his books and have read others. Several of them I have read multiple times. Not only do we have the limited edition Maybe Logic documentary but we drove down to Santa Cruz for the premiere of the film and sat in the front row. My favorite author has passed away. In my eyes he was the last of the psychedelic revolutionaries. Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsburgh, even Terrence McKenna all passed before him. So why instead of feeling sadness do I find myself wanting to cheer and chant, "GO, BOB, GO!"?

Lots of fun at Finnegans wake.