Michael,

I'll take up your offer:

>It is commercially available - http://www.sheandibook.com - but I'd be happy 
>to send you and >whomever else here a passworded .pdf .

I'd be most pleased to read anything you've written.

My only connection with Alan Watts is that the same teacher who
introduced me to ZAMM, introduced me to Alan's book, Psychotherapy
East and West.  WooHoo!, That was a book.   I read it and got what
psychotherapy is all about, and zen too!  A two-fer indeed.

 I do have an Alan Watts story, albeit of a roundabout kind... two
different witnesses to the same event - the scattering of the man's
ashes, into the San Francisco Bay.

The first witness was Carolyn Cassady, who wrote about it in her book,
Off the Road.  That was a fascinating perspective on the whole
literature of the beats.  What must the little woman, left behind
thought about while the boys were out chasing their kicks?  I found
the book through a friend who was her grandson I'd met at Sierra
College, A community college outside Sacramento.

He had mixed feelings about his grandma, Bill did.  On the one hand,
she was a heroic figure, being famous and married to the
fastestmanalive, makes her something of an amazing person right there,
but then they shared their marital bed with Jack Kerouac and  inspired
a whole new set of freedoms in America that bloomed into the free-love
70's and 80's.  And Bill's a pretty conservative guy, raised by a
conservative Ma and mostly found his grandpa infamous.  Everything in
life, it seems to have a two-fold nature.  On one hand, while Bill was
living in San Jose with his dad, they made a movie about his mom's dad
called Heartbeat and shot some scenes on a train and Bill got to watch
and even ride the train with Sissy Spacek.  She was real nice.  And
when his grandma's book came out, he even got to read about himself in
it.  His grandma had wanted his mom to get an abortion, instead of
marrying his father.

But even after that, I kept reading and later on while Carolyn was
still living in Los Gatos,  her big guru then was a guy called  Gavin
Arthur, who'd been given the task of scattering Allen Watt's ashes,
out over the Bay.

The other perspective I got on the event, was from a guy named Tim
Bowden.  Had a site called "Nerdnosh" a story-telling email list, that
both Lu and I got involved with back in the 90's.  Tim had a lot of
stories and man he was good.  He and his brother, Don.  Texas boys,
they were.  Tim with literary pretensions and had corresponded with
Carolyn, and caught her fancy enough that she invited him out and then
one day he turns up on her doorstep, a boy about 1/3 her age and eager
to go.  During the brief period that they were lovers, Tim accompanied
her when she accompanied Gavin, to set the ashes of Allen Watts, to
rest eternally in the waters of the planet.
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