Halloween Reflections and the New Memes Book Update

It is the day before Halloween and I have been working on a variety of things. One of those has been getting the Memes for a New Culture back online. When I moved the seven blogs on bruceeisner.com I promised that I would get it up in mid-September. Well September has gone and so has October.

I will post more about what I have been up to with regard to the book in an accompanying post on my Vision Thing blog. I will update this post with a link to it so you can find out more about when the update will be happening and why it is so late. The rest of this post is about the day itself.

Halloween and the days leading up to it has been a time of both extreme happiness and deep sadness in my life

One of the sad days was two years ago when my mother died unexpectedly on October 27th.  I had moved to Las Vegas in 2003 to spend time with her and she had become one of my closest friends. At my age, you lose a lot of friends but no loss is like losing your mother.

I also remember a happy day, Halloween 1988 in Santa Cruz. I spent Halloween evening with a new lover, haunting the streets of Santa Cruz.

Halloween in Santa Cruz is the biggest Holiday of the year. Bigger than Christmas or New Years by far. It seems like half the town turns up on Pacific Avenue, that long street with shops. Back then that section of town was called the Pacific Avenue Mall.

The next year a big earthquake centered close to Santa Cruz would wipe out the mall and then they rebuilt it they changed the name.

So it was the peak of things for me in life and a peak for Santa Cruz. Both of us would never be quite the same.

Another sad day for me was 49 years ago. I was 12 years old and quite close with my maternal grandfather. His name was Paul Solomon and he was a Renaissance man in many senses of the word.

He spoke 12 languages and loved to build things. In fact, his profession before he retired was Civil Engineer. He had been the lead engineer on both the Tribourgh Bridge and Holland Tunnel when he lived in New York City. he had gotten a medal from President Roosevelt, of which he was quite proud.

As a boy, he came over on a boat from Russia and sold newspapers on the streets of Brooklyn. Later he worked for his father as a barber before getting his engineering degrees.

He used to cut my hair and tell me stories about the old days. He died on Halloween and I remember how sad me and my mother were.  In all the years that have passed since then, I have never liked having anyone else cut my hair.

A psychedelic peak happened to me on another Halloween, the one that came in 1968. I was a student at California State University, Northridge (back then just a state college nicknamed “Valley State.”

In late 1967, I had been experimenting with LSD. By Halloween of the next year, I was member of a the counterculture community at the college which was quite large, one of the biggest by percentage of total student population of any college in the US. For days, many of the most involved of us had worked on a big Halloween party which we had gotten permission to hold on campus.

It was planned as a costume party. I had decided to go dressed as someone I had read about in my philosophy class, Diogenes of Sinope or Diagnoses the Cynic as he is sometimes called. I wore a white robe, had a grey wig and beard and carried a candle lantern to help me in my search for an “honest man.”

I was to be be picked up and driven to the party by a group of friends who I did my weekend LSD sessions. That evening, I swallowed a tablet of purple haze, the famous LSD of Owsley.,

I took the drug and while waiting for my ride, I transitioned into a trip. I felt like I had walked through a doorway into a magic theater where anything goes, aided by my thoughts.

We arrived at the school and I headed into the crowd of students there. At one end of the school, the band called the Fraternity of Man was playing the song with a refrain that went, ” Hello People smile on Your brother everybody get together and love one another right now

I was carrying my candle lantern and like on some earlier trips, I tried a self experiment. I gazed at the candle and chanted the Hindu mantra “Om.” I had learned it a few weeks before while listening to a record by Alan Watts.

As I gazed into the flame, I found it growing increasingly bright. I felt myself moving into the light of the candle. Becoming the light of the candle.

What seemed like quite a long time later, I emerged from this comfortable eternal place. I found myself surrounded by other costumed people, who were waiting turns to join me looking at the candle.  It was an experience i will never forget.