T HE C ENACLE / A PRIL - The ElectroLounge

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but buoyed from my trip. The Hartford Advocate happily published my Burning Man article
but did not renew my job—I struggled for weeks when their sister paper in New Haven
called me to do copy edit work for them. Thus began seven months of commuting about
three hours to & from that city, three days a week. It was good work. I hoped for more
permanent work from them but I’d finally gotten some stability. Scriptor Press work
resumed.
I added a 100 gig hard drive to my Macintosh, & more RAM so it would run better.
An aborted trip to DC to march against the War in Iraq led me to want to do resistance
work of a more native kind to my taste—& I revamped ElectroLounge, adding more content.
November was when two big projects got under way: my return to radio, & to The
Cenacle—
SpiritPlants Radio emerged from the SpiritPlants online community, its forums &
chat. New technology allowed a home computer to become a global transmitter. The station
was the collaboration of people in North America, Europe, Australia & New Zealand, flung
as far apart as possible, & yet in November 2003 there I was reviving my radio show,
“Within’s Within: Scenes from the Psychedelic Revolution,” off air since April 2002, &
sending out new rock albums by Phish, Wilco, the Jayhawks, reading my cracked fixtion &
tripped-out poetry, & renewing “storybook time” by resuming reading Acid Dreams by
Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain. Celebrated the new year with an online cybervisionquest allnight
broadcast.
Cenacle | 47 | December 2002, had languished unfinished for nearly a year after its
cover date when I resumed work on it—I left the cover date standing & treated it as a very
overdue issue—my intent was to finish up this old business head held high again. It wasn’t
Portland that had crushed me awhile—it was a confluence of unfortunate occurences—the
city’s poor economy, my ruined heart, fewer social services now than once for the poor &
afflicted.
So I decided that I would honor what good I’d experienced there, forget nothing but
especially the good things—
Since I intended Cenacle 47 as the issue I
would have done in December 2002 while living
in Portland, I put my photo of the Pioneer
Courthouse Square Christmas tree on the cover.
I’d sat on the steps above it many times, willing
myself to belong successfully to the city I was in.
The issue’s epigraph my motto those days—”No
way out but through”—from Robert Frost.
“From Soulard’s Notebooks” was my letter to
my mother asking for money a second time. She
gave what she could, with this advice: I have no
more, if you are still poor apply for welfare aid. I
tried that; it didn’t work.
The issue’s contents were cheerier, not
all about my current state (then). My fixtion
Blue Period began its serialization. Written in
1998, it became by its end my try at ending my
Cement Park novel series. Drenched in acid,
music, & want, it was devoted to summoning
1968 once & for all, by song, by conjure, by
stroke. I broke linear narrative into multiple
The Cenacle / 55 / October 2005