Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

BUT QUEERER THAN WE CAN THINK.
ALIEN SIGNALS

Carol Christmas, an aspiring actress who had not yet achieved better than Off-Off-Broadway, was always a bit sensitive about her second source of income, so she heard Joe Malik saying "no wife, no whores, no mustache." Oddly enough, Blake Williams, who was picking up parts of several conversations during his own interstellar rap, also thought Malik was saying "no wife, no whores, no mustache." Williams and Carol Christmas both heard Malik's explanation through the semantic carousel around them something like this:

MALIK: Premarital sex, mind you. I was really terrified about the whole younger generation careening to hell in a handbasket with lUD's and condoms sprinkling on all sides. I began to see Commie threats everywhere. Everybody I knew, all my friends, the whole city of New York, seemed foreign subversive unwholesome. By God, I was Middle America.

"EGGS" BENEDICT: "Joe shit!" "Bullshit!" "Who shit?"…

"FIGS" NEWTON: Alien signals. He said alien signals.;?

WILLIAMS:… which is why we're all deviates. If,' Mother DNA had wanted us to be replicable units, She'd have made us insects instead of primates.

DASHWOOD: Well, actually science has been studying orgasms for quite some time now, but what's new about our work is certain psychological intangibles…!

CAROL CHRISTMAS. Marvin, has anyone seen Marvin…

BENEDICT: Well if I were Vlad I know who I'd impale…

CAROL CHRISTMAS: Are you sure he isn't in the kitchen? Marvin, are you out here in the kitchen?

MALIK: That was when I stopped the experiment. There I was, totally at one with Middle America, totally inside the Reader's Digest, and then I came to that title: "No Wife, No Whores, No Mustache."

DASHWOOD: Shattering into atoms is male and undulating is female, but balloons bursting is common to both.

MALIK: I closed the magazine and threw it in the fire. The title was too good to be ruined by an explanation.

NATALIE DREST: Ooh I get that undulating a lot especially when some er guy is you know giving me you… know… head…

DASHWOOD: Yes sixty-eight percent of the females report an undulating experience during cunnilingus…

But at this point Williams realized that he would never recapture the audience previously listening to his outer-space theories, and he also wanted some air. He edged crabwise to the balcony and stood breathing deeply, raising his eyes to study the southern sky and then pick out the bright red glare of Sirius.

"Is Marvin out here on the balcony?" asked a contralto. It was Carol Christmas.

"I'm afraid not," Williams said. "I think he left the party already."

"Oh, did he take all the coke with him?"

"I guess so."

Alone again, Blake Williams communed briefly with the Big Dipper and asked himself what the hell Malik had been talking about: No wife? No whores? No mustache?

"WHO SHIT???" Benny Benedict was yelling inside.

The actual title of the Reader's Digest article had been "No Wife, No Horse, No Mustache," not "No Wife, No Whores, No Mustache." Joe Malik, as he had been trying to explain amid the din of the Wildeblood soiree, had been engaged in neuroprogramming research, trying to become one with the Reader s Digest, when he found that wonderful title, which led him to immediately abort the experiment. He knew, intuitively, that the mystery of a title like that was much better than the solution, the explanation of the title, could ever be.

Joe, whose experiments with hashish had always been guided by the sixth-circuit metaprogramming theories of Hagbard Celine, had brainwashed himself on numerous occasions to become one with not just the Reader's Digest, but with publications and even cassette tapes put out by such organizations as the John Birch Society, Theosophy, the Trotskyists, various assassination buffs, UFO societies, Buddhism, the First Bank of Religiosophy, Scientific American, the Rosicrucians, the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, the Flat Earth Society, the Missouri Synod Lutherans, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and anybody and everybody who lived in a tunnel-reality different from that of his environment. Thus, where most people look at the world through the grid of a single reality map, Joe Malik perceived cosmos through dozens of such grids, changing focus at will. This was not quite the no-ego experience of Zen, he would cheerfully admit, but rather a multiego experience and therefore an alternative way to escape from the stupidity of a single self.

Joe had learned how to move the walls of his neurological reality-tunnel, and even how to wander from one tunnel to another without being infected with Chaneyitis, schizophrenia, mysticism, or the other pathological forms of this sixth-circuit Relativistic consciousness.»

He was one of the pioneers of the HEAD Revolution.

He called it a simulation of satori.

Once, while very stoned, he had even gone so far as to call the experience "I-opening."