A Meaningful Stroll down Memory Lane

Dog Poet Reminiscing.......

I’ve never fit in here. For a long time I thought it was some kind of a curse. I tried to fit in and that generally ended in tragic-comic results. It seemed like life was playing a joke on me, which didn’t strike me as funny a lot of the time. Other people seemed to integrate effortlessly. They knew what to do in different situations. To me it always seemed like I should do something else and that something else did not mesh with the demands of the circumstances or the world I was in.

I got into trouble with the law as if it were some innate ability I possessed. They keyed on me even if I wasn’t doing anything. It wasn’t just the law. It was also the established church and certain emergent organizations with pretensions of becoming the established church. Most of the time, all I had to do was open my mouth to offend someone and I didn’t even know I was doing it.

One time a couple of teenage girls came up to me in the park. They wanted my opinion on Scientology. I told them I thought it was a form of satanic mind control. My kundalini had not yet awakened but people often came to me about different things and I often had a crowd around me because of the things I said. I didn’t know the meaning of what was happening to me. I didn’t know who I was and there’s an argument to be made that I still don’t.

Later in that day these girls came back to me and told me that 'they' wanted to talk to me at the Scientology building. This was the flagship location for the firm in Washington D.C. They weren’t nearly as powerful and rich as they later became but not much has changed, from then to now, in what they are and what they do.

So... I walked over to the site from DuPont Circle and a woman of about forty some years invited me into her office. She asked me what I knew about Scientology. I told her I was familiar with the book, “Dianetics”, and that I thought it was some kind of a scam. In those days a lot of energy was coming off of me so that it wasn’t always what people were hearing from me but what they were feeling. We only exchanged one or two following comments when she jumped out of her chair. She was trembling and unhinged. She screamed at me. “Get out! Get out of here. You’re a suppressive!”

I smiled at her and just walked out of the building. Over the course of the rest of the day and the following day, people would come up to me and hand me a folded slip of paper which said, “I can no longer speak to you or acknowledge you in any way, you are a suppressive.” I thought this was pretty funny and it didn’t matter to me one way or the other whether I encountered these particular people again anyway.

What followed I only found out about later on when a police detective confided in me. Representatives of Scientology went to the police and told them I was a drug dealer and a corrupter of the young due to possessing a Svengali-like persona. They were very insistent that the police do something about it and the police were more than willing to accommodate them.

The police sent a couple of guys into the park to work me. One of them was black and one of them was white. I still remember the name of the white guy, Eddie Verone. There were some amusing events that came out of this but the results were not so amusing.

The first time I saw them they had come into a circle of people where I was talking about something or other. During these days I often said and did things without knowing why. It was all part of pre-kundalini thing. I had gotten a strange hit from these guys so the next time they showed up in my circle I started singing that Dylan song, “Ballad of a Thin Man”. After a moment or so, one of these guys got really uptight and started screaming at me, “Are you saying I’m a cop!” I said, I don’t know what you are. I was usually pretty calm, no matter what was happening and that was because of changes that were taking place inside of me, due to the acid I was ingesting. Probably I should have been paying more attention. I was paying attention. I just wasn’t paying attention to things like this.

At that time I was a close friend of John Hall, who went on to form the band, “Orleans” and did a lot of studio guitar work with certain rock luminaries. Today he’s a congressman in New York.

It should be mentioned here that I was not a drug dealer in any sense at all. I was a consumer. So these undercover cops had to come up with a plan to snare me. They approached a fellow named John Reed who was a serious ne’er do well and who was a drug dealer. John and I were standing in the park a few days later when John Reed came up to me with these guys and said they wanted to get a few ounces of weed from a friend of mine named Frankie who lived in Virginia- ergo Federal implications. I was the only one who knew where Frankie lived. All of us wanted some pot and there were a couple of others guys around who also wanted some, so they decided to pool their resources.

I did not trust the under covers and so I said, “I’ll take you there but I’m not touching any of the money”. That was cool. We got in two cars and drove to Frankie’s place. John Reed jumped out of his car and ran toward the building leaving me behind and one of the undercovers called me to a car window and said, “Here’s $20., get me another ounce. Stupidly I took it and said, “I’ll give this to John". Of course, John was in on it, which is why he ran off. It all went down and we returned to DuPont Circle. A few days later I found out there was a warrant out on me and so John Hall and I split for the West Village in NYC.

Some time later we returned to D.C. and I went to stay with John at his parent’s house in suburban Maryland. His parents were wealthy and very straight. It didn’t take all that long for them to begin to resent what they felt was my strong influence over their son so... and here it gets murky again... a few nights later we were having dinner when we heard a bullhorn outside the house announcing the police and demanding I come out, or else. When we opened the door there were spotlights blazing in our eyes and a number of policemen with guns drawn etc.

I was arrested by a famous Maryland, narcotics officer named “the White Rabbit”. The murky part is that later I was told that John’s parents had leaned on him and he told them I was wanted and I was betrayed to the police. This kind of thing happened to me a lot.

It took six years for me to get a pardon for this nonsense; most of the time I was on the run ...and some of the time I was locked up. Every time I managed to get out I left immediately again which is why it took so long. As far as I was concerned I had done nothing wrong and I wasn’t about to cooperate. I never have and I never will. What I choose to put in my body is my business and not all the king’s whores or all the king’s men will ever change that. If I think a law is reasonable I will obey it, otherwise I will do what I think is right.

The point of this tale is that through all of the things I endured, I evaded all of the terrible things that happened to others in my situation and I am here today with no regrets except perhaps in the area of my early, romantic behavior (grin). I believe I was protected and looked after because there is a higher justice and if you put yourself under its wings you will be okay. If you buy into the temporal BS, or you accept guilt from those guilty of far worse, then the conditions are different.

I believe the same things apply now and always ...and anyone who is willing can place themselves in the care of a power greater than anything they will come up against or... you can rely on your own devices. I would caution you against that. Shit happens, it is true, but when you are ‘in the way of the one’ it always works out to be something better than you expected. Lessons must be learned but there are a lot of ways for that to happen.


End Reminiscence.......

Visible sings: ♫ Every Fairytale ♫
'Every Fairytale' is track no. 4 of 10 on Visible's 2006 album 'Songwriter'
Lyrics (pops up)


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