ONE
He died in his sleep, because men who live morally get to die in their sleep.
That’s not true at all.
TWO
John Perry Barlow was born in 1947, to Mormons. The West is full of Mormons, and Wyoming is in the West, and the Bar Cross Ranch is in Wyoming. You grow things on a farm, but you raise things on a ranch. The Barlows raised cattle. John Perry Barlow was a cowboy. He was first educated in a one-room schoolhouse, because you cannot tell a cowboy story without a one-room schoolhouse, and then his parents sent him off to a prep school in Colorado. There, he met a skinny kid named Bobby.
THREE
My father went that way, too. Sick, sick, sick, and then he woke up dead, having been no better or worse the night before.
I wonder if it happens during a dream.
FOUR
The skinny kid, Bobby, comes out to the Bar Cross Ranch to spend the summer of 1963. He and Barlow ride horses, punch doggies, there are rope tricks involved. It’s the single most important summer in Bobby’s life; part of him is still there.
FIVE
John Perry Barlow wrote this, while drunk at a party in Switzerland, in 1996:
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
The Governments of the Industrial World, upon reading John Perry Barlow’s words, chuckled and said, “You’re adorable,” and sent the Secret Police to computer classes.
Those are the opening lines to A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. Takes balls to write a Declaration, plus a certain social status. If you write a Declaration in a shack in the woods, then everyone’s going to call it a Manifesto.
SIX
The boy shows promise. Wesleyan, where he studies Comparative Religion and writes poetry and serves two terms as Student Body President. Spends his weekends sitting cross-legged in mansions with Tim Leary. Accepted to Harvard Law, and wins a book contract based on a few chapters of a novel. Turns down Harvard, takes the advance, fucks off to India, never turns in the book.
SEVEN
The doctors can keep you alive if you are willing to let them hurt you.
EIGHT
It is 1971. John Perry Barlow, who was born and raised in the West, in Wyoming, is living in New York City. He is dealing cocaine. He is shooting cocaine. He is armed, and almost certainly wearing his cowboy hat. The skinny kid from the ranch has joined a band, and they are playing right outside the city in Port Chester, at the Capitol Theater. No one in the band could write lyrics, at least not well, and so they had given the job to a poet the guitarist knew. At first, the arrangement worked, but then the skinny kid started coming up with songs and needed words, but he and the poet didn’t get along. The skinny kid and the poet had an argument backstage at one of the shows, and then the poet turned to the coke dealer in the cowboy hat, who’d been hanging around all week getting on everyone’s nerves, and said,
“You wrote poetry in college, right?”
John Perry Barlow said that he had.
“Great. He’s yours.”
And he was.
NINE
He was engaged to a woman named Cynthia Horner, who died in her sleep, too. She was 29, and on an airplane. Some people are born with broken hearts.
TEN
In 1972, John Perry Barlow went back to the ranch. His father was dying. He had been to Wesleyan, and Millbrook, and India and Europe and Africa, and New York City. Hollywood, too, but he went back to the West, back to Wyoming and the Bar-Cross Ranch, and that’s where he stayed for a good long while. Don’t get me wrong: JPB would jet off to Paris to hang out with Jackie Onassis on the weekends, but he spent most of his time punching them doggies.
ELEVEN
That the internet is a space ungovernable by fleshy authority, where one is guaranteed both inviolable anonymity and absolute freedom of speech, is not axiomatic. It is not mathematical. It’s precisely the view of the internet you might expect from a Wyoming rancher who identified politically–depending on who was asking–as Republican, libertarian, or anarchist.
I wonder what independence in cyberspace would have looked like to a city-dwelling socialist.
TWELVE
Well past the age when he should have known better, Barlow liked to punctuate his arguments by firing his pistol into the air (if he were outside) or into the floorboards (if he were inside). He still got invited to parties.
THIRTEEN
It would be a finer world had he been right about the internet.
FOURTEEN
There’s a band out on the highway. Everybody’s dancing.
Beautiful
🙁
Well done
i am so sad to hear about jpb. i think he was a very good man. i once read an article he wrote about how the prairie relied on the great herds of buffalo (ungulates?) to turn the soil and allow the grasses to grow, which fed the cattle, but then all the buffalo were killed by the people who raised the cattle and their friends, and the grass didn’t grow like it used to, so there were no more buffalo and way fewer cattle…..
rip jpb.
A fine eulogy.
A few years ago, JPB tweeted something about having just returned from speaking at the CIA or the Dept. of Defense or some such place, and I tweeted something along the lines of it giving me hope for our nation that folks in our government were listening to the man who co-wrote Cassidy. And he replied back to me, kindly noting that they hadn’t invited him b/c of Cassidy. What I’m saying is that JPB spent an instant of his existence writing something to me & it filled me with such joy & I’m so sad that he’s gone but I’m so very happy he was here.
Above all, a fun-lover.
Yes, I think a very good man.
Faring thee well now
Let your life proceed by its own designs
Nothing to tell now
Let the words be yours, I’m done with mine
Flight of the seabirds
Scattered like lost words
Wheel to the storm and fly
The doctors can keep you alive if you are willing to let them hurt you.
I’m an M.D. I’m stealing this from you.
It’s perfect.
All yours, Doc. Nice ER reference. (Why isn’t that show on Netflix?)
Speaking of Jackie O,
JPB helped raise a teenage JFKjr for a bit…iirc.
A couple of goo d reads by our friend and companion: “Principles of Adult Behavior” and “The Pursuit of Emptiness”.
I stumbled across his principles of adult behavior years ago. I make a habit of sending it to younger relatives when they reach a certain age (around 30).
Be patient. No matter what.
Don’t badmouth: Assign responsibility, not blame. Say nothing of another you wouldn’t say to him.
Never assume the motives of others are, to them, less noble than yours are to you.
Expand your sense of the possible.
Don’t trouble yourself with matters you truly cannot change.
Expect no more of anyone than you can deliver yourself.
Tolerate ambiguity.
Laugh at yourself frequently.
Concern yourself with what is right rather than who is right.
Never forget that, no matter how certain, you might be wrong.
Give up blood sports.
Remember that your life belongs to others as well. Don’t risk it frivolously.
Never lie to anyone for any reason. (Lies of omission are sometimes exempt.)
Learn the needs of those around you and respect them.
Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that.
Reduce your use of the first personal pronoun.
Praise at least as often as you disparage.
Admit your errors freely and soon.
Become less suspicious of joy.
Understand humility.
Remember that love forgives everything.
Foster dignity.
Live memorably.
Love yourself.
Endure.
Once I was sitting on the roof of a crumbling castle far far off the beaten track in Pakistan and in a little room on the roof I found a Bob Dylan book containing his advice on turning 30 which was a great place to rwas it for the first time, thanks clucker for making me remember it.
Here it is…..although it apparently was for miscellaneous birthday,but I remember it differently.
https://eduarte.deviantart.com/journal/Advice-For-Geraldine-On-Her-Miscellaneous-Birthday-236303346
Bravo.