Nomad Codes

Possible. Bruce Sterling’s 1991 exhortation still rings in my head, damn him: Follow your weird .
    For weird young writing me, the mark of all this possibility was simply that I was able to get away with so much: paying the rent with Phil Dick profiles and Deleuzian analyses of children’s toys, or getting flown to India on Condé Nast’s dime to write about dancing freaks. As the dot-com bubble grew to obscene proportions in the latter part of the decade, I slaved away on the book Techgnosis , which I am happy to say dodged the hype and remains relevant enough to be still in print. In the new century, my career (I prefer the term careen ) has followed a logic that remains obscure even to me—one that has moved through tech journalism, scholarly critique, memoir, blog, rock-opera libretto, and a deepening engagement with the psycho-geography of my native California.
    Looking over this collection, I still wince occasionally when I come across phrases or arguments that seem forced or jejune. But I resisted the urge to crack the can of worms that real revision would have opened; I merely changed some titles and fixed the most egregious errors and tics. These are husks of time and place, then—perspectives gained from specific journeys or obsessions and then released again as the passage itself moved on.

    San Francisco, June 12, 2010

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

    I would like to thank the editors I have been fortunate to work with over the years, many of whom commissioned these pieces and helped beat them into shape (please forgive any memory slips): Doug Simmons, Joe Levy, Jeff Salamon, Scott Malcolmson, Lisa Kennedy, J. Kinney, Richard Smoley, Jon Lebkowsky, Ashley Crawford, Kevin Berger, Stephanie Syman, Jay Babcock, Mark Pilkington, Mike Jay, Alan Hunt-Badiner, Stephen Dinan, and Albert Mobilio. Also much thanks to Julian Dibbell, Robert Christgau, Mark Dery, and Peter Lamborn Wilson, wizards all. Much appreciation goes to Marcus Boon, Fred Tomaselli, and Susan Willmarth for their contributions to this book, and especially to Mike McGonigal and Steve Connell for their enthusiasm, patience, and daring. As always, I couldn’t have done it without Jennifer, who has shared life with me for most of the two decades spanned by these essays and articles.
    Most of these pieces have already seen the light of day; many have been trimmed and touched up and occasionally renamed herein. Many come from the Village Voice: “Teenage Head,” “Saint Phil,” “The Gone World,” “The Wandering Sufi,” “Calling All Gods,” and “Klingon Like Me.” Another batch came from the late, great Gnosis: “Trickster at the Crossroads,” “Calling Cthulhu,” and “Snakes & Ladders.” “Sampling Paradise” appeared in Option; “Shards of the Diamond Matrix” in Fringeware Review ; “Dub, Scratch, and the Black Star” in 21C ; “Terence McKenna’s Last Trip” in Wired; “The Bad Shaman and the Frog” in a British lad magazine whose name I have forgotten; “Alien Views” in San Francisco Magazine ; “Cameo Demons” in The Wire ; “Burmese Daze” in Strange Attractor Journal ; “Jack Spicer’s Ghosts” in Bookforum. A few articles came from books: “Meditating in Sensurround” from Radical Spirit , edited by Stephen Dinan (New World Library, 2002); “The Paisley Gate” from Zig Zag Zen , edited by Alan Hunt Badiner (Chronicle, 2002); and “Beyond Belief” from AfterBurn , edited by Lee Gilmore and Mark Van Proyen (University of New Mexico Press, 2005). Online, Feed published “Psychonaut” and “Remote Control,” while Salon ran “Matrixter.” “Diamond Solitaire,” “Au Revoir La Contessa,” “Bardo Flight,” and “Aya Avatar” all first appeared on my website, www.techgnosis.com , where I regularly post.

PROLEGOMENON

TEENAGE HEAD

    Confessions of a High School Stoner

    I became a teenager in 1980, the year Reagan was elected president, and by the time the lizard slid into office, I was already a total stoner. I bonged skunk bud, chased JD with Coke, snorted Beauties, and had dropped my first dose of acid the previous Halloween, tripping to Ummagumma amidst the paisley bedsheets and pillows that lined the loft my friend Bry-Fry knocked together in his family’s garage. Phasing between the reveries of a bookish childhood and the hormone-fueled angst of teendom, my mind liquefied, running through the cracks and creases of a suddenly unfolded world.
    In the last couple of years, that world has