Jocasta’s Lost Weekend
Saturday, July 28, 1973
Michael
All right, first, Jocasta.
1. She's gonna go home, have a healthful dinner, turn in early, and get a good night's sleep Well, you'll get all your Fatigue Points back.
2. Because Saturday morning, she's going to get up at the break of dawn, drive to Point Reyes, and spend all day getting absolutely fucking blasted on LSD while meditating on the recent revelations the group has had. If this yields interesting results, she will write them down in her sketchbook.
Excellent. Let's see how blasted she gets and how it helps her meditation. First roll is a HT minus 2 (HT-9 with Fit taken into consideration).
Leonard
>>>> SUCCESS by 3
[Rolled a 6.]
Michael
Wow. The acid doesn't give Jocasta any real bad or distracting hallucinations—maybe it's that government-grade chemistry again—and as she enjoys the warm sunny day on Point Reyes, she slips effortlessly into a meditative state, despite the many concerns and worries circulating through her mind since last night. The acid is helping make her one with nature; as the waves crash against the cliffs below, Jocasta feels the harmony of herself in the web of being. Putting all thoughts of Pat Price, Uri Geller, Andrija Fucking Puharich, and even that night last weekend with Archie and Viv at Terence's, where hey, even Terence's mushrooms didn't seem to throw her for a loop for very long, Maybe I'm just growing so used to these chemicals in my brain, they're becoming one with me the way I'm now able to become one with other people, Jocasta thinks as the acid peaks on a near-spiritual level. The surf, the sun, the wind, they're all part of her. What is at odds with this peace I feel, that I can feel when everything is right? Who are these men who want to ruin this perfect, beautiful world? Where do we stand with them, and how do we prevent their shared apocalypse with the Kings from taking place?
Meditation-17.
Leonard
>>>> SUCCESS by 7
[Rolled a 10. God I wish I was at Point Reyes high as hell right now, watching the swells crash onto the shore instead of worrying that it's too cold to go get the mail.]
Michael
That vision Jocasta saw when she touched Puharich—not a memory or a vibe from the past like her Psychometry up to this point had always provided her, but a real answer to the question of what Puharich saw as the future—gave Jo the clearest indication as to what these accelerationist assholes believe. Some will survive the second coming of History B. The Earth won't all be Theirs. We will exist, said Puharich's secret desires: fully-actualized individuals, hidden in the wilderness, insulated from Their mind control and memetics, with advanced technology and psionics and regimes of physical and mental perfection, living lives of comfort and safety while the rest of the world, those who aren't elect, becomes Their slaves.
Inevitability. That's what Jo sensed. A sense of futility in the constant back-and-forth of the war between histories. SANDMAN can't stop them forever, Puharich figures: we can only forestall the inevitable. Does Jo believe this too? Are we doomed, once the world hits a critical mass of misery, to call Them back, to wish for Them to save us from our own folly and waste and selfishness?
Jocasta doesn't think so. She can't think so. We're not puppets, we're not doomed because "They" made us susceptible to being selfish and short-sighted, easily duped by leaders with no sense of compassion or morality. There has to be something better in our nature. Jocasta weeps, just a few tears really, but it feels like a rainstorm cleansing her. If these accelerationists have misery, division, hatred, cynicism, greed, selfishness... we have hope. We have help, generosity, grace, lovingkindness. These aren't illusions! They're not pernicious memes, trickery of Those Who So-Called Provide. They're what we, humanity, did for ourselves.
But how do you turn that feeling, that trust, that ethos into a shield, an aegis powerful enough to derail the entire Western military-industrial complex of the past three decades from its totalizing goals?
Jocasta doesn't know. She just knows that when the wind and water and sun touch her, she knows every human being could know this connection to the Earth, to themselves, to the web of life. Willis Harman wanted to give LSD to all the CEOs in America to "fix" them. Horrifying. The acid, the neurotransmitters, the "enlightenment"... none of it means nothing without the sense of connection with others. We are stronger together.
We need memes. Memes to sway the people before they can become the immiserated mass Jocasta saw, begging for either Anunnakku or Accelerationist to rule over them.
Leonard
Jocasta, feeling the effects of the LSD trickling out of her like the tears in her eyes, locks her fingers together and stretches her arms above her head. She breathes in the air, cut with the sharpness of salt water and the vegetal decay of plants washed up on the shore. She lets herself cry until there's nothing left, and then takes a long swig of water from the canteen she brought along.
Looking off into the distance, obscured by a little mist despite the heat of the sun having burned away most of the clouds, she thinks about how when she was little, she'd stare off at the sea and imagine it could carry her far away, halfway around the world and beyond, just floating on its pulsating, ancient waves to places she could only imagine. She thinks, too, about how she felt when she learned that as she stood there as a barefoot girl, gazing off at the Pacific, those waves really were carrying people across the sea, not to have adventures in a fantastic land, but to fight and to die in misery.
She takes out her sketchbook and begins to draw. Three drawings: one large, stretched across the top of the page, a rough sketch of the seascape before her. The waves performing their endless writhing dance, eating away at the shore; the sun, low and heavy in the clear sky, surrounded by a glowing halo, a lightbulb that will never go out; the low hills and mounds. All the elements, alone and together, making this place of beauty. Off a ways, on one of the nearby bluffs, she draws a small herd of the Dorset sheep that live on the nearby working ranches. They think they are the sun, comes a thought across her eyes, and we are the sheep. But we are the sky.
The second, in the lower left corner, is a heptagram, drawn in the style of a seal of Babalon in Thelemic magic, but reversed, with the single horn ascendant. At each point, she writes the name of one of the team: her own, Charley, Roger, Mitch, Marshall, Archie -- and, after Viv's name, a question mark. In the center, she writes: "THE WORD". What is the word?, her mind wonders, trying not to chase one of the nonsense leads burbling up from her unconscious from pop music.
The third is an approximation of a comic magazine she found at Max's Liquors last month, a cheap black and white rag called Tales of the Zombie. The cover was by one of those guys who do the lurid fantasy novel covers -- he has a familiar name, but she can't recall it. She crudely details the title and the art: a savage-looking, gray-skinned ghoul strangling someone, a helpless half-dressed female victim (she tries not to roll her eyes) splayed out on the ground before them. And next to them, the title of one of the stories, which she writes out with thick black lines: "NOTHING CAN STOP THE MAN WITHOUT A SOUL!".
She taps her teeth with the end of her drawing pen as the phrase swirls around in her mind. Reaching back into her kit bag for the water bottle, she shifts it off the rock she set it on, and her slight silver Bulova watch slides out. Time to put the clock back on the wall, she thinks idly -- and then, cutting through the fuzz of her fading trip like a howling jet razoring a vapor trail across the clear blue sky, a moment of panic that snaps the high right out of her: Oh, shit! ROGER! She stuffs everything back in the bag and sprints back to her Javelin, to race back to the East Bay to meet her colleague so he doesn't have to break in to sweep her house.
▶︎ Roger Goes Bug Hunting
Sunday, July 30, 1973
Leonard
A reminder that Jocasta is going to spend today on research, either at the main Berkeley library or Livermore or both, depending on what yields the most material. Her priorities: 1. Trying to discover how hard it would be if one wanted to, say, slip a mickey to a guest appearing on the Tonight Show 2. Reading up on the ownership, editorial processes, and other practical production mechanics of Marvel and DC comics 3. A general search over the period of summer '72 to summer '73 in the Bay Area's occult and 'weird' magazines and publications for the most frequently appearing motifs -- basically what we would call a world cloud search today This is all her plans for the day, and there is no real endgame, but it will determine whether or not she watches a quality episode of Columbo tonight or just does some more boring reading. Also, if she happens to catch even a whiff of Archie being menaced at the market yesterday, she might add another item to her agenda.
Michael
I hadn't forgotten! I feel like the best place to do the research you mention is Livermore; Sophie did put together that dossier on Uri with the mention of the August appearance The Tonight Show and given Marshall and Archie probably put together a brief on their appearance back after Mission 1, I think you'd be best served doing it there. Bullet point 3 as well: nothing is gonna match the Livermore library's collection of Weird periodicals. As for 2, I'm gonna give that some thought today to give you the proper roll. But before all that...! Jocasta probably would have caught the 11 o'clock Eyewitness News on KPIX-5 on Saturday night before she went to bed and after Roger had left after wine and lasagna and ice cream and bug sweeping. And one of the lead local stories was the armed conflict at Alameny Farmer's Market. Holy shit, Jocasta thinks back to last night's impromptu all-hands meeting, weren't Archie and Charley headed there today? And lo and behold very faintly in the background of one of the establishing shots on the newscast are what look like the Ransoms (very fuzzy and in the distance) making a harried and quick exit to the parking lot. Jocasta sees the smashed-up United Farm Workers canvassing table and pickup truck and the Teamsters being "questioned and temporarily detained" by SFPD. The story then leads into B-roll about the César Chávez-led labor movement and the rising tensions between UFW and Teamsters over the contract.
I'll kick Sunday off with Research rolls whenever you're ready, Leonard.
Leonard
She'll then add another item to her agenda: getting an ID on those truckers. She'll hit up Padden and Hall if she has to, but she wants names and addresses. She won't do anything about it yet. She just wants to know, that's all.
1Other than that, I'm ready whenever you have time.
Michael
Point 1 actually feels more like a combination Research and Tactics roll. The Research will be at Research-15 for the aid given by the aforementioned reports on the Carson backstage situation. Roll that and then we'll see what the Tactics roll looks like.
Leonard
>>>> SUCCESS by 2
[Just made it, by 2.]
Michael
Cool, then it's Tactics-16.
Leonard
>>>> SUCCESS by 6
[Made by 6.]
Michael
It seems clear that getting backstage at The Tonight Show would be difficult; not necessarily because it's, like, bristling with burly security guys, but because everyone knows everyone else. Of course, once you're in there it's assumed you're part of the staff or one of the entourage of the guests. Now Jocasta considers what it would be like to use SANGUSH to get in and hey, if there were no trained Sandmen backstage, that would be a surefire shot. But all the odds are that Andrija will be there, and with his training, his brain having been partially re-wired by Danbe and American Sign Language, he'll resist it just like any member of URIEL would upon witnessing it. Remember, the glyphs we get from Granite Peak are reliable but also relatively "low-wattage"; a Sandman is more likely than not to see through it. A regular disguise and a fake NBC Studios or Carson Entertainment Group ID? Might paradoxically be a better plan.
Leonard
Could possibly also just bribe a low-level staffer into dropping ayahuasca into his coffee. Ah well, something to chat about over lunch. Jocasta will abandon this line of research, have a cup of herbal tea, and move on.
Michael
Okay, let's do periodicals next. Research-19 here, yes, I'm giving you +2 for x4 Extra Time (since this "word cloud" idea seems like it would take a good long while: most of the rest of the morning and afternoon) and +3 for URIEL's peerless collection of kook esoterica periodicals.
Leonard
>>>> SUCCESS by 13
[Rolled a 6, which I think at this effective skill level is a crit? If not, at least a big success.]
Michael
It's a crit.
So Jocasta grabs all the big publications and begins scanning tables of contents from the past few years. Tallying up types and subjects of stories, trends, and word counts when applicable, Jocasta very quickly sees the trend: starting in around 1971, the mainstream paranormal pubs start leaning away from magic, from hauntings, from the 1960s' (even the early '60s issues!) theme of singularly mystical explanations for paranormal phenomena and start going in on scientific and specifically psychic/quasi-materialist explanations for historical occult phenomena instead. More and more the stories refer to laboratories where experiments are being undertaken, of respected university and private researchers getting their feet wet in the exciting new world of paranormal research. (Only a couple of stories mark the pre-existence of folks like J.B. Rhine and the Society for Psychical Research; the overall theme here is that this scientific explanation for these phenomena is a new and exciting trend, lending credence and verifiability. Moreover, this potential is available in nearly everyone, not just the mystically-attuned or those chosen by higher powers.
"New. Exciting. Credence. Scientific verifiability. Everyone can be psychic. Even you."
These are all the messages of the Harmans and SCANATEs and Uris of the world.
Jocasta then goes looking for more common phrases like these and falls into a pattern. Photocopying pages and circling them and seeing not word-for-word duplication in these stories, but more like theme-for-theme and sentiment-for-sentiment. But the patterns are there. It's not that the articles are trying to convince anyone to believe, but more like they're a constantly, mutually-reinforcing belief structure that explains everything neatly. A series of small particles of ideas clumping together to form...
Memes.
These are memes.
Okay, Jocasta is not a trained memeticist, and lord knows she probably knows that flying through the air, on the radio, in the newspapers and on television are dozens, hundreds of SANDMAN-crafted memes designed to keep the sleepers asleep and content, but here, in these threadbare, cheap pulp paperbacks? A concerted, years-long memetic campaign of influence on their readers? If Jocasta isn't 100% sure this is packing some serious source code oomph because of her not being trained to identify and deploy memetic programming, she's nearly 98%. Or she's just paranoid.
Anyway, Archie would be able to tell right away, with all the information she's just collated and organized. It's already 5 pm? Jocasta looks at the softly-buzzing institutional wall clock in the library. If these were memes, they sucked her in to a point where she lost track of time. And whether or not Jocasta is a carrier for this "psychic powers are trainable and quantifiable" memeplex, well, she figures she's been inoculated by being part of this mission to confront Uri and Andrija and SCANATE.
Leonard
Whoa. Okay. Jocasta will take a pretty quick smash-and-grab research run at the comics stuff and then head home, finding this a decidedly Columbo-worthy discovery, and sitting down to prepare a report for Archie and Marshall tomorrow about this memetic pattern and what it means.
Michael
I was gonna suggest Current Affairs (Pop Culture) for the comic stuff but I realize now that's not a skill Jo has so it Defaults to IQ minus 4 or 11.
Leonard
>>>> FAILURE by 5
[Yikes, that's a big fail, missed by 5, albeit one that probably accurately reflects the reality that at the time these companies were the legacy of quasi-organized criminals and were largely run as tax dodges]
Michael
Further research is needed. Perhaps even... a trip to a dedicated comics direct retailer.
Leonard
[Your determination to expose Jocasta to the nerd community is not going unnoticed, Grasso]
Fair enough. Jocasta will pack it in, drive back home, and settle in for an evening of Columbo while typing up her report.