I thought "The Matrix" was a documentary film by Frederick Wiseman

In my old age, my actual occupation every day is to read the New York Times, to savor it.  Profiles of each juror in the Libby case. New exhibit in midtown.  Avant-garde theatre in Chelsea.  New restaurant on 95th street that you can't get into, except for lunch.  Cracking the puzzle without using a pencil.  Well, only on Mondays is that possible.  But the whole experience is beautiful.  I have carefully learned to live vicariously and avoid those horrible airport experiences.  In my old age.

Yesterday, Jean Baudrillard died.  I read about it in the New York Times. When I came home from my daily drive, I picked up The Ecstasy of Communication and read through the underlined parts.

"The promiscuity which reigns over the communication networks is one of a superficial saturation, an endless harassment, an extermination of interstitial space."

And he wrote that before the invention of cell phones.

The Gazette didn't cover this, of course.  They didn't even cover the Libby Trial.  While the NYTimes had a nice headline and inside pages listing all the jurors and charts and everything you ever wanted to know about the corruption and lies of the Bush Administration, the Gazette was pretending it didn't happen at all.  The headline buried in the third section said something like, "Jury doesn't believe Libby."  Just a few paragraphs.  Hilarious.

Because people don't want to know the truth.  They want the comfort of their illusions.  Or, as Baudrillard would say, the illusion has overcome all pretense to reality anyway.  We live in Disneyland.  We shop for the experience of spending money.  

I've been going through this tax audit for six months now.  And just as the final letter comes from IDES, stating that their total summary of all this paper sorting and dread and agony has resulted in my owning $10.56.  They probably spent $20,000 auditing me.  I owe ten bucks.  Nice.

The audit has reminded me of the six months I spent in Cook County Jail in 1969.  It has that kind of restrictiveness, a gnawing dread more than actual fear, something paranoiac brewing in my gut...  that kind of thing.

But being reminded about Baudrillard today -- not that I was glad about his death, but... -- made me feel liberated.  I remembered how illusory everything is.  How my last two months of meditating on the subjects of love and prayer and withdrawing from many social obligations (trying to gather again to myself some interstitial space) may be bearing fruits of consciousness.

Similarly, the method I am taking to sort through my tax papers for the 2006 filing has set up a methodology, a work plan for proceeding with what I refer to as my Moby Dick, my East Bend comic/novel memoir, that I'll speculate now will take me at least until spring of 2008 to wrap up.  If I'm lucky.

So, in the end, with Libby convicted and Baudrillard reminding me that life is Disneyland, I drove home in a minor flashback state, the memory of my old license plate HLOOSN8, glimpsing the dreamspace that we inhabit, inside a world that glowed anew in that indefinable moment that the Grateful Dead referred to singing "such a long, long time to be gone and a short time to be there" and William Burroughs (with horror) described as the naked lunch that sits on the end of every fork and the Doors, quoting Huxley, referred to when the "doors of perception are cleansed, everything will appear as it really is, infinite."

People in the other cars, even those with their peeling Bush bumper stickers, were beautiful again, not strange.

Everything is forgiven, because Scooter was dying for the sins of the fathers, because Baudrillard passed on and still lived, because there was a hero, a warrior for truth, Patrick Fitzgerald, an Eagle Scout who insists there is truth to be told, and -- at the same time -- there is Baudrillard, who reminded us that for every thought one has "one must expect a strange tomorrow... Truth has withdrawn (just as one pulls a chair out from under a person about to sit down)."