In my twenties, instead of going to college, I decided to pursue an education. Outside, under the stars, it was the Sixties. I lived in the streets, or in alleys and gardens and stairwells, constantly running parallel and keeping pace with the tides of the Pacific Ocean . On occasion I rented rooms, to house the artworks I was producing; at the same time amazing friends with the eclectic interiors that resulted. At other times I amazed them with LSD, as I practiced an unorthodox and definitely unlicensed psychiatry upon them, setting psychological traps from which they were encouraged, but rarely able to escape. Drug-induced paradoxes of the mind, split into pieces and reinserted into the psychiatric text books I was reading, reliving in the flesh the captivating studies of Freud and Jung, Adler and Maslow. But for me, Lawrence Kubie said it best: it's all nothing but neurotic distortion of the creative process.

All these books were on loan from the Santa Monica Public Library. Somehow they'd granted me a library card, although I carried no identification other than a disability check stub - "Aid to the Totally Disabled" it was called in those days; later to be PC'd as Supplemental Security Income - and, they should've guessed, I had no intention of returning their materials.

Perusing those piles of books, I practiced the technique 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, representing a new map of the territory, open to random pages in search of the old patterns. Sure enough, what I learned from one book - perhaps a passage or an entire chapter - was likewise learned from all the other books, concurrently, whether I read them or not.

As stated, I was driving my friends crazy with LSD, 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! Even Freud prefaced everything with a line of coke and a couch. (Now who ever heard of exploring the interior by packing in a piece of furniture and a stoned doctor?)

At one point I managed to check out more than 80 books; the majority of them proudly displayed on a mantle piece steadied between two charred and cherubim-shaped bricks. These appropriated diplomas testified to my credentials as a true psychedelic shamanic doctor artist of our combined cultural post paradisiacal breakdown, if I had to put a label on it. Incredible: everyone seemed impressed by the shit I was making up according to their presence; little did they suspect that I hardly understood a word of any of the hyperbole from which I abstracted my theories!

The story begins, late one afternoon, while tripping my head off on some tasty psychedelic, and 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. My greatest fear was upon me: they'd finally come to arrest me for felony book possession. At first I tried to ignore the knocking, but finally had to give in and open the door to a discovery as awkward and maddening as the truth Columbus had to face in the eyes of the natives that had no idea what he was talking about anymore than he did.

"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, 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 acid. 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 yourself trapped in the presence of a potentially homicidal maniac - as I imagine he probably did, seeing me standing there incoherent, in the equivalent of chemically induced psychotic state.

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), whereupon she would 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!

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

And so it was I began my advance studies, utilizing the (now defunct) Dewey Decimal System on my behalf, amassing an even greater personal library than the one I had reluctantly surrendered that fateful day the Investigator arrived at my door. In fact, by the time I finished three weeks in residence at the Santa Monica Public Library, I had expanded my collection by yet another hundred dog eared volumes, some from the coveted reference-only stacks. (Yes, today I am ashamed. What could be worse that coveting your neighbor's wife? Coveting her culture, that's what.)

It wasn't like I meant to do it; let's say the drugs compelled me. Everyday on the way to work, at midday lunch break, and even on duty in the actual library, crouched invisibly between stacks, I huffed and puffed (the marijuana) and blew the place down. Of course an occasional hippy smiled at my sacrilege, but most often a staunch patron wondered at the 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 a long story short, eventually I couldn't deal with the commitment I'd made, cruising the academic interior with decimal points and alphabetical arrangements as my only maps. Then there was the barrage of questions from patrons, all day long seeking directions no more clearer than mine. It was absolutely clear that I didn't know where I was - perhaps somewhere between the Cyclops and Penelope, On The Road home I suppose - so how in the world was I gonna know where all these other people were headed?

With reluctance, and a new personal library at my disposal, I returned to my studies, which took a new turn into Photography, the modern telescope that eventually helped me to see all those people that I had placed at such a distance in my youth. It gave me the ability to examine them up close. And I'm now able to write about them with some certainty, instead of just read about what someone else said they were up to.

But 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 this period, the landlord did the right thing and returned the books to their rightful owners - you and me, the past, the present and the future. Tense, no more.