In my twenties, instead of going to college, I decided to pursue an education. Outside, under the stars, it was the 1960’s and a new awareness was unfolding. Indeed, newer translations of the older texts were being formed. Indeed, it was the Sixties and youth everywhere were returning to the Garden for re-outfitting. Word. Flesh.

I lived in the streets, in alleys and gardens and under stairwells, as I attempted to keep pace with the tides of the Pacific Ocean. On occasion I rented rooms, to house the artworks I was producing, amazing friends with eclectic interiors of crystallized awareness. Word. Flesh.

At other times I merely amazed my visitors with LSD, practicing an unorthodox and unlicensed psychiatry upon them, setting psychological traps from which they were encouraged, but rarely able to escape, even when taking leave of my company. Complex drug-induced paradoxes of the mind that I split in two and reinserted into the psychiatric text books I was reading, reliving in flesh the captivating studies of Freud and Jung, Adler and Maslow. Lawrence Kubie summed it up when he elaborated on God’s revelation – “It’s all good!” – pointing out that it had all been recently transformed into “neurotic distortion of the creative process.”

All these books I was getting my ideas from were on loan from the Santa Monica Public Library. Although I carried no identification other than a disability check stub, somehow they'd granted me a library card. One would think that as intelligent an organization as a library should've guessed that I had no intention of returning their materials. (But what the hell, I hadn’t a clue either!)

(Note: Disability checks in those days were referred to – and were actually printed on the face with the slogan -- "Aid to the Totally Disabled." Nowadays, in this more politically correct age, they have come to be known as Supplemental Security Income. And beware of being penalized if you actually do supplement your income!)

I practiced a technique of research I believe is referred to as “unit study.” Every one of the books I checked out -- be they psychologies, art histories, mathematical or magical formulae, or just plain fictions -- were all spread out on the floor in front of me like a great un-worked jig saw puzzle. In truth, their haphazard juxtaposition on my floor represented a new map of the old territory, openly searching the old patterns that were re-forming themselves in ever-newer combinations and relationships.

In so doing I learned a basic truth that applies to all growth and evolution; what I learned from one book (or discipline) -- perhaps a passage or an entire chapter -- was likewise learned from all the other books and disciplines concurrently. And that was true whether I read them or not! One language sufficed to interpret all the other languages, reunifying the whole.

It was amazing. I could set down a text I’d just perused on Ancient Archaeology, then pick up my camera and change the settings to accommodate a more focused depth of field without having any idea of what I was doing or why! But you could see the learning taking place in the marvelous photos I made during the 60’s in California; pure documents and testimonies I shoved into a shoe box without then realizing there importance to subsequent generations. Ah, education, you go girl!

As stated, I was driving my friends crazy with LSD, Peyote and Mescaline, along with the somewhat legitimate-sounding psychoanalysis I was performing unawares on them. Sure, they'd believe anything, with drugs coursing through their veins. What did anyone really know about the workings of the subconscious anyway! Everyone is a little crazy and out of synch; it doesn’t take much to push the button. Even the illustrious Freud prefaced everything with a line of coke and a couch.

(Now who ever heard of exploring such a complex interior as the human soul by packing in a piece of furniture and a stoned doctor?)

At one point during my research into the human psyche, I managed to check out more than 80 books. The majority of them were proudly displayed on a mantle piece, steadied between two cherubim-shaped bricks I’d chiseled from the patio adjacent to my apartment. More than just decorations, these appropriated diplomas acted as my credentials. To the stoned contingency hanging around my place, these books identified me vicariously as a true psychedelic shamanic doctor artist of our combined cultural post paradisiacal breakdown -- if I had to put a label on it. Incredibly, everyone seemed impressed by the shit I was making up out of the signals their presence provided me; little did they suspect that I hardly understood a word of any of the hyperbole recorded in the books from which I abstracted my very own theories of illusion!

So the story begins late one afternoon, while tripping my head off on some tasty psychedelic, I was trying to make sense of a sudden commotion at the front door. "Library Inspector" sounded the timid voice from the other side of a divide greater than the void that separated my Ego and his Id.

Talk about paranoia! Here I was sitting on a cache of nearly a hundred library books, all overdue by months, greatly exceeding the limits of the card itself. And it looked like my greatest fear was finally upon me: they'd come to arrest me for felony book possession! At first I tried to ignore the knocking, like any self-indulged drug addict of the Sixties might do. But my nemesis wouldn’t go away. Alas, I had to give in and open the door. To me it seemed an encounter possibly as awkward and maddening as the one the Native Americans had to face when Columbus landed on their shores. Yes, the writing was on the wall -- even if I couldn’t understand it.

"What books?" I stammered when he asked where they were. I attempted to lead him, in a circular manner, away from the bookshelf and towards the side of the room where a handful of volumes lay naked and open on the floor, obviously a few of the objects of his inquiry. I scooped up an armload and thrust them at him: "Here! Take these!" simultaneously pushing him through the door and pointing him south towards Santa Monica.

Remember, I was tripping on a dangerously toxic amount of L.S.D. Looking back on this event I can understand why the Library Investigator remained speechless, satisfying himself with but a small fraction of the literary contraband he'd been sent to reclaim. Imagine being trapped in the presence of a potentially homicidal maniac -- as I imagine he probably did, seeing me standing there incoherent in my chemically induced psychotic state, quoting Homer and R. Crumb, and assuming I was looking for a letter opener or some kind of weapon to put an end to the nightmare. (He probably wasn’t far off in his fearful imaginings.)

It wasn't long (that day? the next?) before I got a call from the head librarian, a sweet and wonderful lady whose name I've since forgotten (if I even knew it in the first place). Pleasantly, and without protocol, she appealed to my integrity, asking that I return the remainder of the books to the library at my leisure. It was evident that she had the authority to forgive my obscenely outstanding fine and call off the Investigator. However, she also stipulated that I would not be able to check out books in the future. Hmm.

Well, leave it to me to muddy the waters! I reckoned I had a more amazing offer for her, one she couldn't possibly refuse: "Put me to work, allow me to work off my overdue fine. That way I can reclaim my honor in the community, through a humiliating work of public service. And oh yeah… please issue me a new library card (one perhaps with limited borrowing power) so that I can continue my artistic studies!"

And believe it or not, she accepted my terms!

Forthwith I began my advance studies -- (by then I’m not sure in what field, or if it even mattered) -- utilizing the (now defunct) Dewey Decimal System on my behalf to amass an even greater personal library than the one I had reluctantly surrendered that fateful day the Investigator arrived at my front door. In fact, by the time I finished three weeks in residence at the Santa Monica Public Library, I’d expanded my collection by yet another hundred dog eared volumes, some from the coveted reference-only stacks.

(Yes, today I am indeed ashamed of my possessiveness. What could be worse that coveting your neighbor's wife? Why, coveting her culture, that's what!)

It wasn't like I meant to “steal” books. Let's say the drugs compelled me. Everyday on the way to work, and then at midday lunch break, and even on duty in the actual library where I crouched invisibly between stacks, I huffed and puffed (marijuana or hashish) and blew the place down. Of course an occasional hippy smiled at my sacrilege, recognizing the heady aroma, while staunch library patrons merely wondered at the odd smell. Thank God the common reader didn't know what pot smelled like back then, otherwise I would've been busted a lot sooner!

To make an epic story short, eventually I couldn't deal with the commitment I'd made and walked on out the door. I surmised that cruising the academic interior with decimal points and alphabetical arrangements as my only maps wasn’t going to locate any new lands for me to declare. Then there was the barrage of questions from patrons. All day long, dozens of well-meaning patrons seeking directions to the bathroom or the classical music section ended up getting seriously lost when I gave them directions to somewhere else. Looking back on this fiasco, it is absolutely clear that I didn't know where I was -- perhaps somewhere between the Cyclops and Penelope, like Jack Kerouac I was On The Road home I suppose. Yeah, looking back on it, how in the world was I supposed to know where all these other people were headed?

And so with reluctance, having escaped the Halls of Wisdom with an expanded personal library at my disposal, I returned to pursue my solitary studies. And because my acid dealer had gifted ne with one of his cameras, I left Freud sprawled out on the couch, grabbed his stash and made it out the door and into the light. And right on time! This medium was like a modern telescope, eventually helping me to zoom in on all those people I had placed at such a great distance in my youth. It gave me the ability to see past the surface and into the soul. And today I'm able to write about the human condition with some certainty, instead of just read about it in a library book. (Take that, Freud!)

In the final analysis, I guess the happy ending to this story is knowing that when I left the apartment I was holed up in during that period, the landlord did the right thing and returned the books to their rightful owners – that’s you and me, the past, the present and the future. Tense, no more.