Mu

Or: a better world.

We live in a timeline where a lot of people (almost always white men) read Ayn Rand and various SF and fantasy books at an impressionable age, as very many people did, but then somehow never grew up and are busily burning the world as a result. I miss the timeline where those same people read the Illuminatus! books at the same age and never grew out of them. That world would be so much better and so much more interesting.

I can report though, that the same ‘how did these people never grow up?’ thing would apply. I read the books at perhaps 14 and spent much too much time having stoned conversations about what it all meant. I mean, I went to talks by Robert Anton Wilson, I was that far gone. About a decade ago I found my ragged copy of one of them, bought the other two and reread them and … well, don’t do that: you can’t jump from this timeline into that, better, one if you are macroscopic and warm.

But the people who never grew up would be doing stuff which was so much more interesting.

I’m pretty sure, by the way, that the timelines forked in about 1980. I clearly remember seeing a band called The Justified Ancients of Mu (there was only one ‘mu’ I am sure) at what I think was a Deeply Vale festival about then (it must have been one of the later ones as I would have been too young for the early ones). They can’t have been an incarnation of the KLF: they were something related to Nik Turner I think. But … perhaps they were, perhaps it was still possible, then, for there to be leaks between the timelines, and in that lost timeline everything started a decade earlier. Who knows, really? Perhaps, then, I could have escaped into that better world? The internet knows nothing about them now.

Somehow I am sure this is related to the lost decade.