The California Bear Story from Down and Out in Mendocino

Extraction of The California Bear Story from Down and Out in Mendocino, currently a free Ebook. 

Potter was a homeless marijuana broker by trade, a middleman for various friends and friends of friends. And he was a pure Bohemian, the type Thoreau would be proud of. He believed that the majority of the world were spoiled bourgeois eaters who just wanted to possess things and capitalize on people and place. None of this was out of step with anyone else around, but Potter believed the primary way the infernal maintained their control and kept people concerned about materialism instead of reality, was with electrical power. Electrical powered housing was the root of all the world’s problems as Potter saw it, keeping people boxed up and boxed in. He believed homeowners were simply following unrecognized Neanderthalistic impulses to have well-lit caves whereas more mentally developed people refused such caveman practices to observe the stars. 

    Potter never left Mendo to conduct business and rarely left Mendo at all, except under extreme duress and for various annual festival pilgrimages. He considered town his own federally recognized homeland. Potter never even once contemplated obtaining a driver’s license, calculating it to be a clear breach of his ethics, but also essentially signing over permission to state to kill you and take your organs if you were simply unconscious in an accident. He walked, biked, hitchhiked and tagged along all across the county with only rare dilemmas and the occasional night spent ditch sleeping. 

    Potter believed the rest of the world was ‘enslaved by the white devil control grid’ of electrical power and that Mendo was one of the last free places left. Potter imagined some far off remote places, he knew not where, must be like Mendo, enclaves of freedom just far enough away from the hypnotic control of the white devil control grid to be decent, but he knew not where and dared not to seek them out.

    He called white sugar, white devil powder, but sniffed up anything of any color intoxicant as if it were not devilish. He himself was near albino with brown hair that somehow reflected a pink tint that was the texture of a Brillo pad. His white devil control grid idea was from taking acid and watching the film The Matrix. Since then, Mendo was Potter’s Zion and he was Neo, in the learning phase, before he could fly, surrounded by unwitting slaves to the matrix.

    Potter lived in total disregard for popular establishment and proudly practiced civil disobedience 24/7, primarily through constant intoxication and his refusal to partake in any ‘materialistic quests.’ He refused to rent or own housing and refused to own or wear shoes, becoming a master repairer of flip flops with feet impervious to thistle and cold. He referred to himself as ‘a master outdoorsmen’ compared to what others called him, ‘the barefoot vagrant.’ He slept outside or on people’s floors where he believed minimal electrical interference took place. 

    He constantly compared electricity and world events to the film The Matrix, but only the first one as he noted the others were crap and he declared were obviously written by people who stole the original. To Potter having a home and paying electrical companies for use of cancerous amperage and voltage was akin to surgically inserting wiring up one’s chakras. He introduced himself to newcomers as Maverick and imagined himself a guardian of Mendo, his Zion, a protector from outside evils standing against the agencies of white devils and the control grid of electrical housing. 

    Rolland was much more interested in the nonfiction story of The Matrix manuscript as opposed to the fictional story itself. The Matrix is science fiction about people battling the architecture of a biological historical criminal discrepancy. But the script, supposedly about the future return of the Christ consciousness and the machines sent to kill him, was rumored to be plagiarism of sorts. Rolland felt there was archetypal value in the plot of the film certainly, but also in the unfolding nonfiction story surrounding the manuscript in real life and its possible exposure of Hollywood corruption around a story about the return of Christ and robots trying to kill him. Potter didn’t pay much attention to all that. He assumed everything, especially Hollywood, was corrupt to the very core, a city surrounded by the electrical industry of entertainment and its lighting, audio and visual machines is bound to result in evil he would propose.