Joe Mac McKenzie PhD

Part 1

1.I was a white baby born in the White Memorial Hospital in the Willowbrook district next to Watts in Los Angeles. We lived in a house on Naranja Drive, north of where Doran and Galen intersect over which now is embedded the Ventura Freeway.

2.My parents always told me the story of my excessively happy babyhood, I went to sleep shaking my head back and forth sideways laughing and singing. In South Gate, next to Compton, south of Los Angeles in the late 1940''s the houses were small and close together. The old couple next door neighbors reported my parents to county Child Services as baby torturers. When the CS workers arrived and heard me "moaning", they naturally rushed in and found the reality and immediately left. I continued to shake my head as a way to go to sleep, sans singing, into the ninth grade, which may have given me a modified brain.

3.My first memory is that my parents were cabinets and ate some white power, which I thought was sugar, but was actually poison associated with their house painting. Whether at that time or around that time, I was in the crib/bed when I notices the simple picture of a boy shepherd with a sheep. I then entered the picture and found myself in a huge mansion rooms with people that at the time or this I could not understand so I escaped the mansion by sliding down an enormous slide.

4. I spent the next three decades at school avoiding religion and studying the scientific method and Darwin. I got an assistant professorship at University of Wisconsin-Platteville. My bride and I bought a two story wood frame house constructed right after the civil war. It seemed a good idea to buy a wood stove and then to fill it with the numerous dead trees. So you get permission from a farmer and fire up the chain saws. One of my teaching colleagues cut a wrong angle which put his chain saw blade through my right knee. A tourniquet was applied,but I was substantially leaking. I was pleased that I could see all the detail in the forest from the back of the pickup on the 12 mile trip to the small town in the back of the pick up truck even though my glasses were smashed and unavailable. The only trouble was that I was looking down on the forest from 300 feet above.

5.I kept moving up up and away until the forest was a speck and I was in the clouds until they became a total whiteness. Now there was a sound, a single note which was perfection and I realized that I was part of a total whole and that there was no me. I was quite happy about this. But it didn't last. I swiftly began falling and I was immediately back in the pick up truck and on to the local hospital and pain.

6.I escaped for almost another three decades. Then when I was teaching as professor at San Diego Mesa College I got a bad case of pneumonia and the first doctor gave me pills which I later found out had been in use a long time and to which pneumonia had developed a resistance. It was the weekend and I went down fast. So I was taken to some small clinic and I got a shot of something. I was taken home and in the upstairs bedroom went into a deep sleep. Now I entered a bleak elevator, pressed the button and went down, down. It got darker and colder until it was completely zero nothing. The elevator stopped, but the door, wherever it was. did not open. Slowly, the elevator began to rise. Eventually, my eyes opened in the empty house. I crawled out of bed to the floor and crawled down the stairs. I knew I had to do what it wanted. Weeks later, after I had got back to work and was at the computer, I began to compose the first paragraph of ARK II. Years later, with the help of my good friend Angelo, ARK II was hammered into the Procrustean bed of the Amazon format.