RAW by Bobby Campbell

I was actually in attendance at this talk, held at The Prophets Conference, a New Age confab held in various cities about fifteen years ago. This one was held in Palm Springs in mid-December of 2000. I wrote about it a bit on Boing Boing, in my contribution to their Robert Anton Wilson week:

The RAW fans contingent in Palm Springs were totally distinct from everyone else present (goths and cyberpunk vs New Agey senior citizens who wanted to hear about Pleiadian prophecy and 2012 Mayan stuff, which Bob just hated). Bob got really ripped on hard alcohol before his talk and swore like a sailor, which seemed to deeply offend the organizers of the event. We ended up hanging out in his hotel suite, smoking pot. A young guy had given him a bag of these black psilocybin mushrooms which he’d managed to smuggle into America from Ireland, which Bob didn’t really seem to want and gave to me (my god were they strong). It was in Palm Springs that I got to see firsthand how bad his post-polio syndrome had gotten. He was getting pretty wobbly on his feet, but this did not seem to dampen his enthusiasm in the least for copious amounts of Marlboro reds, whiskey and weed.

Mentally he was certainly as sharp as ever, that never changed, but his health seemed to go downhill quite fast in the years I knew him. The aforementioned “enthusiasms” were often consumed with rapacious gusto for a man of his age and he once revealed to me that since nearly everyone who he had ever loved in his life was already dead, he was going to smoke as many cigarettes and pound back as much Scotch as he damn well pleased. Bob’s your uncle!

Read more of Wilson and I, by Richard Metzger (Boing Boing)

I’m not sure how ripped Bob appears to be in the video, because he could hold his liquor pretty well, but trust me, he was fuckin’ bombed