I want to talk a little bit about my friend Chaz. He lived in a trailer
with his mother, had dread-locks, and usually wore dirty cloths. Two
summers ago Chaz taught himself how to make LSD and then proceeded to ingest
a lot of it. Chaz was a lot smarter back then, he couldn't teach himself to
make LSD nowadays. Anyway, for the next two years, Chaz saw reality a
little differently from everyone else. He once said to me �Some days the
trips are long sometimes they�re short, but when I wake up each morning I
realize yup still tripping.� Chaz started this journey with less-than-noble
intentions. He just wanted to get high and win the respect of other
hippies. After getting a little more than he bargained for, Chaz�s values
changed. He became a sort of �mystic.� Once we we�re standing in a grocery
store parking lot waiting for this girl to steal cigarettes and Chaz is
playing with these sort of juggling sticks. He has three sticks and hold
two to balance the third stick and spin it, throw it, and catch it with his
two control sticks. The usual squares are walking out of the Food Lion
pushing shopping carts and staring at him.
Chaz starts to spin the sticks, then starts to spin himself and drops the
sticks and just runs around the parking lot and spins and shakes his head.
He�s happy as a clam. I once asked Chaz what his ambitions were and he
explained to me that right now his purpose in life was to get a new engine
for his bus. Everything else is on hold until I can get a new engine and
then I�m going to drive up to Canada to see these kid�s I know and smoke a
lot of kind bud. Chaz would spend a lot of his time sitting in a public
place with a guitar and singing about hemp or how people should be more
aware of social problems. He often saw things that weren�t there. Chaz had
no sense of personal property. He would give away everything he owned,
again and again. He once said to me �If I don�t give it away, I�ll just
lose it. So I might as well give it away.� Chaz eventually did get enough
money to get his bus fixed though; he drove to Canada a few weeks ago.
Was Chaz chasing after biological quality? Just what felt good? He didn�t
value pleasure in the same way we do. He would sometimes cause himself pain
for seemingly no reason at all. He sex drive was scrambled. Chaz certainly
didn�t want anything to do with social quality. He didn�t care what other
people thought of him, even other hippies. He had no regard for laws or
table manners. He was only interested in intellectual ideas that seemed
kind of far out, like auras or vibes. Well was he all about dynamic
quality? He did seem to see everything in a child-like way and most people
would consider him insane. He fits Pirsig�s criteria there. But, Pirsig
also said hippies were degenerate. Maybe Chaz was just degenerate.
That�s it. He destroyed the biological quality of his brain, attacked the
social quality of laws. And filled the intellectual realm with a bunch of
low-quality ideas. Chaz certainly wasn�t holding on to any static patterns
except his inorganic and a little biological. Chaz was probably degenerate
to quality. But why was he so happy then? Maybe he was seeking dynamic
quality at the expense of biological, social, and intellectual static
quality. So dynamic quality moves away from static quality. It is bad for
your health, painful, illegal, and stupid. If this is what dynamic quality
is that it doesn�t sound much like quality. All our objections to �dropping
out� are static objections. I want to keep my health, pleasure, legality,
friends, and my intelligence. Dynamic quality isn�t worth giving up all
that.
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