Ginsberg and Leary in John Henry lyrics

No one wants freedom of thought, so they demand freedom of speech as a sort of compensation.

-- Kevin Solway

It's hard to remember sometimes (though Flansy has been making it a bit easier lately) that They Might Be Giants are Boomers, and that their allusions are often to the music and "culture" of that period. I've been listening to their 1994 album John Henry these days -- especially "I Should Be Allowed To Think" and "The End of the Tour."

"I Should Be Allowed" begins with the Very Serious opening lines of Allen Ginsberg's degenerate beatnik pedo cri de coeur, set to the lighter-than-air advertising-jingle tune of the Association's "Everyone knows it's Win-dy" -- a juxtaposition which strikes me as a pretty clear-eyed appraisal of that era. The nod to the Association also brings to mind their "Enter the young, yeah, they've learned to think" -- an unintentionally ironic precursor to TMBG's intentionally ironic song. ("Enter the young" would of course have meant something quite different to NAMBLA member Allen Ginsberg!)

"The End of the Tour" begins thus:

There's a girl with a crown and a scepter
Who's on WLSD
And she says that the scene isn't what it's been
And she's thinking of going home

What is this but a veiled reference to Leary's mantra? Tune in (the radio station), turn on (LSD), drop out (go home).

License plate syncs

I have recently posted on the number 666, and on a dream about Charles Manson and Timothy Leary. This latter connection was reinforced this morning when I followed a link on Anonymous Conservative to a 2019 Telegraph article called "Making a murderer: did the CIA's secret LSD labs turn Charles Manson into a killer?" Leary is not mentioned in the article, but of course his name is synonymous with LSD.

Less than an hour after skimming the Manson article, I was stopped at a traffic light and suddenly became aware of the license plates of the three motorcycles stopped in front of me: NB6-616, MRK-75?? (I forget the last two digits, maybe 74?), and LDS-286. These entered my consciousness simultaneously and were all immediately perceived as meaningful.

I read the first one as "Nota bene: 66(1)6" -- that is, note well the number of the beast. (Some manuscripts of Revelation have 616 instead of 666.) Later I realized that NB itself could also stand for "number of the beast."

In that context, MRK obviously suggested the word mark, as in "mark of the beast." It also made me think of marek, which I (erroneously?) believed to be the Arabic word for "apostate." Back in 2002, when I had recently left the CJCLDS and sometimes lurked on exmormon.org, one of the regular posters there used the handle Al-Marek and explained that it meant "the apostate" in Arabic. Apparently, though, he just made that up; checking various online dictionaries and translators, I can find no such Arabic word.

Since MRK had made me think of my 2002 apostasy from Mormonism, the last license plate really jumped out at me. LDS of course means Latter-day Saint, i.e. Mormon, and 286 is the Simple English Gematria (S:E:G:) value of my full name. That is, if A=1 and Z=26, the sum of all the letters in William James Tychonievich is 286. (The number of the beast is also traditionally interpreted in terms of gematria, 666 and 616 being the values of two different transliterations of Nero Caesar.)

The combined message of the license plates was, then, "Mark well the number of the beast, apostate Mormon William James Tychonievich!"

Only I'd remembered the gematria wrong. As soon as I was off the road and could use a calculator, I added it up and found that the number of my name is actually 268, not 286. To make the license plate match my name, I would have to transpose the last two digits. And what about the other part of the license plate, LDS? If we perform the same transposition on it, we get, yes, LSD. (And if we transpose the last two phonemes of Latter-day Saint, we get Latter-day Satan, i.e. the antichrist or "beast." The S:E:G: value of LDS or LSD is 35; three and a half, or 3.5, a prominent number in the Book of Daniel, is borrowed by Revelation and associated with the antichrist.)

The LDS/LSD connection is made in the 1986 film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Kirk and Spock have time-traveled back to the 1980s, and Kirk tries to explain Spock's odd appearance and behavior by saying he "did a little too much LDS" in the sixties. I referenced this line recently in my April 29 post "Gadianton Canyon syncs," when a YouTuber dismissed a bit of Mormon-adjacent folklore (the Gadianton Canyon Incident) as most likely the result of "shrooms or LSD."

I have no particular interpretation of all this so far. We'll see where the sync fairies decide to go with it.

Timothy and Charlie

I often dream of book titles, but this time I dreamed I was actually reading a book. It was some sort of history of the sixties, and I was reading about how Timothy Leary once tried to recruit Charles Manson to help him spread the gospel of LSD. Nothing had come of it, but later, when Manson had become notorious for his supposed role in the supposed murders, this recruitment attempt became a sort of scandal and permanently damaged whatever was left of Leary's reputation.

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After waking up, I naturally did a web search for charles manson timothy leary to see if my dream had had any basis in fact. It turns out that the two did meet briefly in 1971 or 1974 (accounts vary), when Leary's cell was next door to Manson's in Folsom Prison. Of course this was after Tate-LaBianca. There's even a play based on this meeting, with the Snakes on a Plane-esque title Charles Manson and Timothy Leary in Folsom Prison, which was written by Peter McLaren and performed in Toronto in 2009.