Craziness doesn’t make for good magick. So why is this stuff so valuable?

For decades, crazy people have been walking around the streets of Berkeley handing out manifestos. By “crazy people” I don’t mean those tedious idiots in the RCYB who hand out the Daily Worker and stick up posters about “Socialist Albania!” I mean seriously bughouse crazy people. Schizophrenics, most of them.

There is (or was, till he froze to death; schizophrenics aren’t so good with self-preservation) Serge, who hadn’t bathed in years but would sometimes hand you a neatly-typed sheet of paper laying out THE EFFECT OF DIRECT LIGHT ENCOUNTERS ON ORGANIZED-CRIME BOSSES. And the loopy motherfucker who stuck posters up all over Bancroft Avenue detailed exactly how it was that Stephen King and Ronald Reagan conspired to kill John Lennon.

There are dukes who think that these nutbirds were tapping into magickal mojo and got their brains fried. Or that the Polka-Dot Man is really an avatar of The Fool. Well, it ain’t so. These crazy people were (and are) just crazy people.

But if you have one of those flyers that Serge handed out, or better yet a rain-smudged sign with a Xerox of Stephen King’s picture from the cover of Newsweek and red marker reading KING/REAGAN ASSASSINATED JOHN LENNON, there’s two things you should know.

The first is, there’s an cobweb farmer in Berkeley named Sather (that’s his first name, and it really is his name) who will give, or take, just about anything to lay his hands on those items. They’re dense with historical meaning. They penetrated deeply into the consciousness of his city for decades. And because they were just useless ephemera created by crazy people, nobody thought to save them.

The second is, you don’t want to be anywhere near Alameda County when he gets his hands on them.