GRANNY

      He is like Kazantzakis and Kesey, but he's also like Nixon and Reagan. There's an old, old side of him that's still very frightened and needs to control. He hates this side of himself, this controller that's always keeping up appearances. He calls it Granny. Fuck you Granny!

      Fuck you. Remember what that means, Dickey boy. Do you fuck? Ever?

      Oh, it's so easy for him to let it slide out there to tricky Dick and Ronald land. But it's the controller, the stager within himself, who's always worried about how he should look and act. He separates himself from this controller now and looks at him, looks at Granny, the controller, worried about how he looks. And how it'll look on this page too. Granny has had power over him for a long time. He looks at him there, the controller, the stager. He can't trust him at all. He comes on automatically, whenever he's not fully conscious.

      In the bathroom mirror, all he sees is battle. He's a warrior, tearing himself apart fighting Granny. He worries about money and Granny comes, comes whenever there's fear, is fear itself, incarnate, comes saying, "but you should be scared, you're broke and have a lot of bills. It is all really depressing, all this real life mess, but somebody has to deal with it, you know." All this fear and upset over money, is it real or is it just the red herring that Granny uses to gain power over him?

      The battle rages on. He's stretched thin, each fingernail and claw trying to keep it all together between his newly found, wild, animal acid side and his frightened and controlling Granny side.


     Earlier, when Karen came home, he was still completely out of his head; yet the stager within him took over and put on a sane show for her, actually pulled him out of his acid wanderings and back into ego. He even faked how he was with his new dog Gypsy, instead of just playing wild with her as he'd done when they'd been alone.

      The root image for Granny comes from his father. As soon as he was old enough to notice these things, he saw that his father had gotten his fear and his need to control from his mother, from Grandmother Minerva. And now she's become a voice inside his head, always commenting on what he's doing and on what he should rather be doing. Whenever he's not fully awake, she takes over and stages what she thinks others want of him, rather than allowing him to just be himself.