11/3/2007 - Saturday morning

Reading Cave of Stars, by George Zebrowski, on his way back home from San Francisco, where he purchased the Live from the Archives KFOG CD--all the proceeds are donated to Food Bank. With all the volumes issued so far, they've donated over $3 million dollars.

He likes to read all sorts of stuff--Science Fiction, music diaries of the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia....the guy sitting behind us piped up Van Halen and he agreed he had read something about Van Halen.

In the Grateful Dead, he said, there really is an inner family among fans.

From Cave of Stars he's learned this so far: religion can mess up a world. In the book a colony is established and Catholicism is instituted as a way of control.

Favorites--2001: Space Odyssey and 2010, Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke.

If he were to write his own book, it would be non-fiction, about his life. He would talk about spirit walking with his friend after taking peyote, guided in the desert, he by a coyote, his friend by an eagle and how it's made him appreciate the earth, to see things on many levels. He would talk about about the circles he's been part of, the many things that he's experienced, like living on a small island in the Caribbean called St. Lucia, where, though the people are not rich, they have food, family and shelter. Now, he said, the tourism has gone from European to American and has made the island aggressive and greedy, but when he went, he was able to live in the jungle and share with the locals. There was none of what people get over-concerned about here, the bling bling, money, houses.

He told me about a book called Comrades and Chicken Ranchers, by Kenneth L. Kann, which is about the communes set up by Russian immigrants in Petaluma. His grandparents were part of one when they came over to escape religious persecution.

In the world of the Deadheads, he is known as the Pinwheel man.