Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

by Tom Robbins

and not only is my name infrequently tumbled in the lapidary of public consciousness, but those rare homes in which it’s spoken with any regularity are likely under police surveillance.

subject to the effects of mnemonic erosion,

can write to me at: P.O. Box 338, La Conner, WA, 98257,

I'm totally go to write to his postbox even if i never get a response

and in her absence I’d attempted to drink a bottle of mercurochrome,

My mom used to put that on mycuts, I was petrified of the sting

A Cherokee maiden has received word via the tom-tom

Of course it was a tom-tom Tom

to the yang and the yin, to the rise and fall of the cosmic pumpkin;

Is that a riff on Charlie Brown's Great Pumpkin

would have generated a kind of optical chatter,

A great visual

average Christianized Americans (with whom I’ve a whole abattoir of bones to pick)

It resembled a self-propelled licorice whip from the Marquis de Sade’s candy shoppe,

gallery I observe daily the wholesale distortion and corruption of consensual reality by corporate interests, their Madison Avenue pimps, and their stooges in government,

The lesson was the same: This program is subject to change -- often unexpectedly, sometimes in the batting of an eye. It’s the best argument I know against suicide.

nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book.

upstaged fellow some of us had taken to calling “the World’s Tallest Midget.”

I remember my friend telling me about a pro wrestler that promoted himself as the world's tallest midget - he was of median height

The device was an early prototype of the microwave oven, though nobody used that term in 1933;

Wow, I had no idea the concept had been around that long!

he surely would have risen to an even higher executive position were it not for the fact that he talked like a character from the Li’l Abner comic strip.

This car ran like Joan Rivers, on and on, defying detractors, requiring no repairs beyond the cosmetic, leaving newer models in its dust.

Her standup was great, couldn't stand her talk show

Could it have been, I wonder, a similar exhibition that gave McDonald’s the idea for its golden arches?

Taking the piss to Rotten Ronnies

Today, my voice sounds as if it’s been strained through Davy Crockett’s underwear.

grounds that the comedy that really matters in this world is always inappropriate.

However, the negative reviews of my deportment on monthly report cards (a foreshadowing of critiques from the more small-minded members of the literary establishment?),

Personally, I’ve found maturity an overrated quality except in wine, for both creative artists and lively people in general have much to gain from facing the world with the unsullied vision, flexible responses, and playful sensibilities of a child.

defined life as “the beautiful joke that is always happening.” The roof had been blown off of the cellblock of consensual reality and I was escaping, climbing toward the stars, trailing tatters of abandoned orthodoxy, surfing a tide of higher wisdom that is forever off-limits to the sober and the prudent.

And speaking of Pats, super-evangelist Pat Robertson was a member of W&L’s class of 1950, but while he would go on to contribute mightily to both the commercialization of Christianity and the dumbing down of America, his talents for those black arts hadn’t announced themselves in college.

Those black arts

It’s been said that golf is a Zen activity. I’d argue that if golfers were practicing Zen, they wouldn’t keep score. Or ever get angry when they blow a shot. But what do I know? If you recall, I owe my personal enlightenment to a neon golf ball.

Or if it was simply that heaven didn’t want us and hell was afraid we’d take over.

that it’s a privilege to love someone, to truly love them; and while it’s paradisiacal if she or he loves you back, it’s unfair to demand or expect reciprocity. We should consider ourselves lucky, honored, blessed that we possess the capacity to feel tenderness of such magnitude and be grateful even when that love is not returned. Love is the only game in which we win even when we lose.

White kids were being tutored in “private schools” that met in church basements (Praise blue-eyed Jesus!),

American Jesus! The blue eyed bank roller

What? Rossini wrote the William Tell Overture?

They were discussing Tell on No Such Thing As Fish consensus is he was not a real person

uncharacteristically hushed until one of us would come upon a bristling horn section of chanterelles, silent as if waiting for some elfin conductor to raise his baton;

I saw a book title recently that was something like: Mushrooms the Silent Hunt

Aside from my conviction that for maximum benefit, the forbidden fruits of LSD are best savored in solitude,

even agreeing when he argued that to truly “conquer” space, men need to travel inward as well as outward, and do so with the same focus, seriousness, effort, courage, and determination they would devote to searching for life on Mars or establishing a colony on the moon.

Now, my all-time favorite accolade from a book reviewer was when Fernanda Pivano, Italy’s best-known critic, wrote in a leading Italian newspaper that “Tom Robbins is the most dangerous writer in the world.”

How cool is that quote!

and I needed sufficient income to charm the groceries.

Well that's timely, grocers are making record profits, yet no one's income is keeping up to inflation

Apparently, there are people who confuse the powers of imagination with the effects of intoxication.

There's something profound here. If I had to guess, I would say it's because the average adult's imagination is so stunted/restricted, that it is only under the influence can it manifest anything wonderful, so they assume it's the same for Tom.

Surely there’s no secondary market in drawers of the dead.

Sounds like a george romerro movie

There are those who have condemned Leary as a liar, a sellout, an opportunist, and most of all, a raging egomaniac; but the truth is, he was simply Irish.

The rehabilitation compound existed for the purpose of teaching domesticated orangutans how to be wild again. Maybe she called men back to the forest to teach them the very same thing.

As I look back on the scene, it seems a reenactment of those early episodes in which young Tommy Rotten would drink ink, topical antiseptic, and stringent household products intended for scouring.

My mom likes to tell people she had the poison hotline number memorized when I was young as I drank all sorts of stuff that one shouldn' t.

The hippopotamus is a vegetarian but ferociously territorial (you might find that true of certain vegans you know),

until my handler from Bantam signaled

Look Robbins it's the Bantam signal!

particularly lonely nights he might even brush his own teeth with it, its presence in his mouth re-creating the sensation of her kisses. There’s not a romance novelist on the planet who could come up with something one-tenth as touching as this.

I missread that as one-teeth

between an attempt to mentally force fortune to alter its course for one’s personal gain (to manifest, say, a winning lottery ticket), and possessing the lightness of spirit and the freedom of mind to live as if such developments would pale in comparison to those one regularly experiences at the piano, the easel, the writing pad, or upon viewing a pattern of fallen leaves in the gutter; to live -- against all evidence -- as if advances in fortune were already here.

Need to burn this into my mental circuits!

If I have been given any gift in this life, it’s my ability to live simultaneously in the rational world and the world of imagination.

I would aspire for the same