Howard W. Campbell

The Autobiography Of An Inattentional Magician

Chapter 1 Awareness

To write an autobiography of Howard W. Campbell would be as asinine as to read an autobiography of Howard W. Campbell, so we have that in common.  I was just reflecting on how much of a cosmic schmuck I am for swiping brilliant sleights of mind and not crediting my sources. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you.

It's not without serious reservation that I begin chronicling my path of magical self-discovery, my metamorphosis from a cosmic schmuck to a magician. I’m sorry I don’t write better, faster and more accessibly. It would save us both a lot of time. My lack of citation is a choice. I don’t want to be distracted by proper nouns which I often struggle to recall.

I always imagined someone else volunteer their services before my 2nd autobiography. Unfortunately, my self-appointed-biographer Liz Boswell has shown no interest whatsoever in drafting a manuscript before I die, which precludes my perspective on my methodologies, like the dialogue between Buckminster Fuller and his biographer Applewhite in Cosmic Fishing. And so, I am forced to take on the task myself, knowing such a memoir will be useful for many of the others.

This ouroboros manuscript is a self-refinement delivery mechanism. However, at times I feel distracted from what I had imagined was the goal of my present theatrical play, The Three, a One-Act theatre of the mind that makes the zeitgeist of our dominant modality irrelevant. When my brain begins to reel from dehydration, I make an occasional cheese dip. I should be drinking more water.

Doctors have agreed I am psychologically unemployable, and so I receive SSDI. I’d like to prove them wrong, but I’m not willing to work in QRC for ethical reasons. For the last two years, I have not been hired for any of the 28 jobs for which I have applied. Perhaps employers sense in me a denial of their values. That’s not my intention. I simply vibrate differently, and I stand up for my civil rights. Employers and landlords have even said that they physically fear me, yet I have zero history of violence, and no arrest record. I begin my examination of the method. I repeatedly say that the tensegrity of my work relies fundamentally on two basic principles: lovemarks and synergetics, or metaphysical gravity as Bucky would call their application.

I have practiced the fine art of cosmic fishing, and while it comes at some cost, this practice has made me, I dare say, the performer of the most amazing card trick you have ever seen in your entire life, and for which I now see I was a bigger cosmic schmuck than I ever possibly imagined. My cosmic schmuck principle holds that if you occasionally notice that you've been thinking or acting like a cosmic schmuck, you will become less of a cosmic schmuck, and the more often you notice that you're thinking and acting like a cosmic schmuck, the less of a cosmic schmuck you become. On the other hand, if you never, never, never suspect you might be thinking or acting like a cosmic schmuck, you will remain a cosmic schmuck for the rest of your life.