Took a lunchtime stroll to Poe’s grave to put my new Canon Rebel XS to the test. It’s nice having a serious camera—I’ve always loved shooting photos, but frequently ran up against the limitations of point-and-shoot. So far I’m very pleased with the results.
Weird. Poe keeps coming up today – first in a book I’m reading (which I’ll get back to), then in a post in a synchronicity blog, and now here … I wouldn’t have thought much of it, except that as I scanned down I missed the end of the post and ran into the next one – about Cyberpunk … ’cause the book I’m reading, where Poe first popped up today, is Rudy Rucker’s classic cyberpunk “Ware” trilogy.
Probably ‘mere coincidence’ but it made me laugh –
- and I also enjoyed that your Poe post is a graveyard post – and the comment you left on my blog, leading me here, was about “serendipitous wanderings” – which a friend of mind had previously commented on, reminding me about one such wander that had taken us into a graveyard, where we’d had an interesting synchronicity with gravestones (http://teapotshappen.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/how-to-coinci-dance/#comments) ….
oh, and that other Poe mention I saw today on a synchronicity blog was from Trish MacGregor, the person who’d commented immediately before you, on my blog. (http://ofscarabs.blogspot.com/2009/07/poe-remastered.html)
Nice. I guess it should be no surprise that we can wander serendipitously online as well as off.
Thanks, Zap. Many years ago I was a member of a synchronicity listserv, and one of the list’s luminaries, a friend named Ray Simon, spoke of serendipitous online wandering as “followlinking.” We spent a lot of time as a group testing out various online synchronicity generating techniques, with remarkable results. Ray died close to 10 years ago, and I still miss him greatly. Some of his material can be found via archive.org:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020306174451/http://users.rcn.com/raysimon/index.htm
Here’s an example of his technique:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020310121237/users.rcn.com/raysimon/lee1.htm
(As an interesting followup to that experiment, Ray actually became the webmaster for author Peter McWilliams … synchronicity turning into a working friendship.)
Here’s another example of followlinking:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020403200559/users.rcn.com/raysimon/glenn.htm
Ray died of a brain tumor at far too early an age. He was one of the smartest, wittiest and kindest souls I’ve ever known, and the only “virtual” friend (we never met) that I held as dear as any friend in the flesh. Our conversations about synchronicity were delightfully stimulating and inspire me to this day.
Thanks, I look forward to reading those links.
Was he a psychonaut by any chance? The tumor made me think of McKenna. I’ve done some consciousness hacking where I could feel changes in my brain, I swore (such as getting incredibly stoned and trying to experience my visual input raw/unfiltered and apparently starting to have a seizure as a result, actually having some kind of seizure on shrooms, etc), and I do have “MS lesions” in my brain … not tumors, but still. It makes me wonder …
I recently unearthed a marginal note-to-self I’d written down in 2005 (a year before the MS diagnosis, in a document in which I was basically trying to figure out all of reality, basically, lol):
“If I think like this too much, could I give myself a stroke??? I think I just almost did. I’m not surprised at the way the mushroom guy died of a crazy brain tumor, either. The colony of grey cells in our skulls that have specialized into processor sub-units are not safety tested beyond certain parameters, along certain neural pathways. Beware symptoms of “burn out.” Well, that’s assuming that a mental overload could be distinuished from a insight-based lack of giving a shit anymore, from my perspective. A good sized assumption, given the ego-preserving way that we are programmed to “make sense” of the things we find ourselves thinking and doing …”
Oh well. It’s better to burn out than fade away, eh?
Zap — He was of the age where most people experimented with entheogens, but it wasn’t a primary focus of his.
I’m not sure I would agree with a connection between McKenna’s substance usage and his brain tumor, but I couldn’t rule it out. It feeds into the “drugs destroy your brain” mentality, for one, and there is no concrete evidence that psilocybin has any effect on brain structure. But then, who knows. McKenna did experiment a lot with DMT, and there’s very little known about its toxicological profile or the possible adverse effects of occasional or regular usage.
A friend of mine has MS, and she’s had remarkable success on a special diet (mostly vegetarian). You’ve probably already heard of it.
Yeah, gotta agree with you, although my brain is always seeking connections. I have nothing but love for the entheogens, although I will be careful about what I combine them with … I think the traditional users who fasted beforehand were onto something, since a trip can get whats in our blood onto our neurons, across the blood brain barrier … while I might not totally fast, I’m sure not gonna have any excitotoxins or the like in my system either.