Jitterbug Perfume, Week 31, Daffy Yum

JITTERBUG PERFUME
Week 31, May 5 – 11

Page 223-ish

"Reality is subjective, and there's an unenlightened tendency in this culture to regard something as 'important' only if 'tis sober and severe. Sure and still you're right about your Cheerful Dumb, only they're not so much happy as lobotomized. But your Gloomy Smart are just as ridiculous. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don't think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form o' self-indulgence. "

I read recently that popular opinion has it that Wiggs Dannyboy was fashioned after Terence McKenna. I had always assumed Dannyboy was based on Timothy Leary, after reading lines like..."left his native Dublin to teach at Harvard, where he experimented with mind-altering chemicals beyond the call of academic duty...." and "Since it was hardly in the best national interest to relieve citizens of their violence, greed, fear, or repression, the government acted to silence Dr. Dannyboy by arresting him on a phony marijuana charge and checking him into the steel hotel. Escaped, only to be nabbed two years later...and imprisoned again." I know it needn't be an either/or situation, but surely there is some Tim in with Terence.

Gem