The first signpost came after that marvelous day I went hiking up the canyon road again to the highway at the bridge where there was a rancher mailbox where I could dump mail (a letter to my mother and saying in it give a kiss to Tyke, my cat, and a letter to old buddy Julien addressed to Coaly Rustnut from Runty Onenut) and as I walked way up there I could see the peaceful roof of my cabin way below and half mile away in the old trees, could see the porch, the cot where I slept, and my red handkerchief on the bench beside the cot (a simple little sight: of my handkerchief a half mile away making me unaccountably happy)—And on the way back pausing to meditate in the grove of trees where Alf the Sacred Burro slept and seeing the roses of the unborn in my closed eyelids just as clearly as I had seen the red handkerchief and also my own footsteps in the seaside sand from way up on the bridge, saw, or heard, the words “Roses of the Unborn” as I sat crosslegged in soft meadow sand, heard that awful stillness at the heart of life, but felt strangely low, as tho premonition of the next day—When I went to the sea in the afternoon and suddenly took a huge deep Yogic breath to get all that good sea air in me but somehow just got an overdose of iodine, or of evil, maybe the sea caves, maybe the seaweed cities, something, my heart suddenly beating—Thinking I'm gonna get the local vibrations instead here I am almost fainting only it isnt an ecstatic swoon by St. Francis, it comes over me in the form of horror of an eternal condition of sick mortality in me—In me and in everyone—I felt completely nude of all poor protective devices like thoughts about life or meditations under trees and the “ultimate” and all that shit, in fact the other pitiful devices of making supper or saying “What I do now next? chop wood?”—I see myself as just doomed, pitiful—An awful realization that I have been fooling myself all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going and actually I’m just a sick clown and so is everybody else—All all of it, pitiful as it is, not even really any kind of commonsense animate effort to ease the soul in this horrible sinister condition (of mortal hopelessness) so I’m left sitting there in the sand after having almost fainted and stare at the waves which suddenly are not waves at all, with I guess what must have been the goopiest downtrodden expression God if He exists must’ve ever seen in His movie career—Eh vache, I hate to write—All my tricks laid bare, even the realization that they're laid bare itself laid bare as a lotta bunk—The sea seems to yell to me GO TO YOUR DESIRE DONT HANG AROUND HERE—For after all the sea must be like God, God isnt asking us to mope and suffer and sit by the sea in the cold at midnight for the sake of writing down useless sounds, he gave us the tools of self reliance after all to make it straight thru bad life mortality towards Paradise maybe I hope—But some miserables like me dont even know it, when it comes to us were amazed—Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and joy and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and LAUGH . . . but I ran away from that seashore and never came back again without that secret knowledge: that it didnt want me there, that I was a fool to sit there in the first place, the sea has its waves, the man has his fireside, period.
That being the first indication of my later flip—But also on the day of leaving the cabin to hitch hike back to Frisco and see everybody and by now Im tired of my food (forgot to bring jello, you need jello after all that bacon fat and cornmeal in the woods, every woodsman needs jello) (or cokes) (or something)—But it’s time to leave, I’m now so scared by that iodine blast by the sea and by the boredom of the cabin I take 20 dollars worth of perishable food left and spread it out on a big board below the cabin porch for the bluejays and the raccoon and the mouse and the whole lot, pack up, and go—But before I go I realize this isnt my own cabin (here’s the second signpost of my madness), I have no right to hide Monsanto's rat poison, as I’ve been doing, feeding the mouse instead, as I said—So like a dutiful guest in another man’s cabin I take the cover off the rat poison but compromise by simply leaving the box on the top shelf, so nobody can complain—And go off like that—But during my absence, but—You’ll see.