Polycule

Convenience Stories: Chapter 10

The day before our trip, I went to the Western PA Hypnosis Club for my aphantasia treatment. When I was there, I had them throw in some past life regression for the hell of it. Past life regression isn’t real in the sense that it dredges up past life memories (that’s my current understanding of it at least). That said, it may invent real hypnotic or imaginal experiences that can be quite fascinating, and I wondered if they might have therapeutic value in the right hands. Either way, I wanted to experience it, so I drove Route 65, past the Red White and Blue and a Burger King. Like a lot of towns, there were old photos of local veterans on the flagpoles, portraits of men in uniform along with their name and rank and the years they served, and if they died in service. As I was driving, I swear I saw Lee Harvey Oswald’s portrait fly past the car window, but when I swung back around it was no longer there.

The Western PA Hypnosis Club is a prefab shack on the side of a busy, not terribly scenic road, nondescript except for a big sign that reads: HYPNOSIS. If you don’t look closely, you might assume the sign said PSYCHIC or ADULT BOOKS.

I parked in the lot feeling somewhat conspicuous, like I was going into an adult bookstore, and the bored woman behind the counter handed me a clipboard and a Bic Crystal ball-point pen. At once both ubiquitous and an icon of industrial design, the pen features a clear hexagonal barrel, an element that was considered futuristic when it was introduced in the early 1950s. It’s also functional, allowing users to monitor ink levels. I learned all this when I saw it on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In the same room, a Bell-47D1 helicopter, designed by Arthur Young in 1945, was suspended from the ceiling. This is the classic two-seater with a clear plastic bubble body and skis featured at the beginning of every episode of M*A*S*H. 

I first heard about Young when The Verge published my story about real-life occultists who worship the fictional deity Cthulhu, a character in the work of early science fiction/horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. After he read the story, one of Young’s former students started calling me and tweeting at me incessantly. At first, our conversations were fun. The guy was a little wacky, and he told me which UFO researchers were connected to Waldorf schools and the Church of Scientology, things like that. Then he became a nuisance and I had to mark his number spam. He’s probably talking shit about me on Twitter as I type this.

Arthur Middleton Young was born on November 3, 1905, in Paris, France. Young, the son of an American from Philadelphia, graduated from Princeton in 1927. In school, he dabbled in art, philosophy, and even cosmology as he attempted to create a philosophical theory of the universe that was based on something he called “Process.” Young believed that there is a force in the universe beyond that known to modern science, a force that contributes to growth, life, and movement. He wanted to put meaning back into science, something it had lost along the way from the Renaissance to the helicopter.