Charles Manson Quotes

If you want to test cosmetics, why do it on some poor animal who hasn't done anything? They should use prisoners who have been convicted of murder or rape instead. So, rather than seeing if perfume irritates a bunny rabbit's eyes, they should throw it in Charles Manson's eyes and ask him if it hurts.

Marilyn Monroe wasn't even her real name, Charles Manson isn't his real name, and now, I'm taking that to be my real name. But what's real? You can't find the truth, you just pick the lie you like the best.

You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody's crazy.

Look down at me and you see a fool, Look up at me and you see a god, Look straight at me and you see yourself.

Total paranoia is just total awareness.

I can't judge any of you. I have no malice against you and no ribbons for you. But I think that it is high time that you all start looking at yourselves, and judging the lie that you live in.

I'm nobody I'm a tramp, a bum, a hobo I'm a boxcar and a jug of wine And a straight razor ...if you get too close to me

We`re not in Wonderland anymore, Alice.

The real strong have no need to prove it to the phonies.

Sanity is a small box; insanity is everything.

The mind is endless. You put me in a dark solitary cell, and to you that's the end, to me it's the beginning, it's the universe in there, there's a world in there, and I'm free.

Death is the greatest form of love.

In my mind's eye my thoughts light fires in your cities.

No sense makes sense.

Do you feel blame? Are you mad? Uh, do you feel like wolf kabob Roth vantage? Gefrannis booj pooch boo jujube; bear-ramage. Jigiji geeji geeja geeble Google. Begep flagaggle vaggle veditch-waggle bagga?

These children that come at you with knives--they are your children. You taught them. I didn't teach them. I just tried to help them stand up.

If you're going to do something, do it well. And leave something witchy.

You people would convict a grilled cheese sandwich of murder and the people wouldn’t question it.

Remorse for what? You people have done everything in the world to me. Doesn't that give me equal right?

You got to realize; you're the Devil as much as you're God.

Pain's not bad, it's good. It teaches you things. I understand that.

Fear of vikings build castles.

I know and understand you are much more than what I think you are but first I must deal with you the way I think you even if that's only my own thinking and not you.

Animals shouldn’t be hunted and nature shouldn’t be disturbed, even destroyed, to benefit the whims of mankind

Now I am too beautiful to be set free.

The way out of a room is not through the door. Just don't want out. And you're free…

I don't wanna take my time going to work, I got a motorcycle and a sleeping bag and ten or fifteen girls. What the hell I wanna go off and go to work for? Work for what? Money? I got all the money in the world. I'm the king, man. I run the underworld, guy. I decide who does what and where they do it at. What am I gonna run around like some teeny bopper somewhere for someone elses money? I make the money man, I roll the nickels. The game is mine. I deal the cards

...And eventually, he (Charles Manson) testified to an empty court, as Bugliosi had convinced the presiding judge Older, that Manson's hypnotic powers might convince the jury he was innocent.

I don't believe there is any such definition, there is no such thing as evil, only moral judgments based on what society believes to be wrong behavior.

Like I said, magic comes from life, and especially from emotions. They're a source of the same intangible energy that everyone can feel when an autumn moon rises and fills you with a sudden sense of bone-deep excitement, or when the first warm breeze of spring rushes past your face, full of the scents of life, and drowns you in a sudden flood of unreasoning joy. The passion of mighty music that brings tears to your eyes, and the raw, bubbling, infectious laughter of small children at play, the bellowing power of a stadium full of football fans shouting "Hey!" in time to that damned song—they're all charged with magic. My magic comes from the same places. And maybe from darker places than that. Fear is an emotion, too. So is rage. So is lust. And madness. I'm not a particularly good person. I'm no Charles Manson or anything, but I'm not going to be up for canonization either. Though in the past, I think maybe I was a better person than I am today. In the past I hadn't seen so many people hurt and killed and terrorized by the same kind of power that damn well should have been making the world a nicer place, or at the least staying the hell away from it. I hadn't made so many mistakes back then, so many shortsighted decisions, some of which had cost people their lives. I had been sure of myself. I had been whole.

From the world of darkness I did loose demons and devils in the power of scorpions to torment.

I'm Jesus Christ, whether you want to accept it or not, I don't care.

There is no way that you can know the taste of water unless you drink it or unless it has rained on you or unless you jump in the river.

Violence, and evil, doesn't always come dressed in black, and it doesn't always look like Charles Manson. Nor does it always come to us as obvious and arrogant[...]. Often it comes to us with the simple plea to be reasonable.

America trembles in fear of loners, yet Charles Manson is a social butterfly.

I have ate out of your garbage cans to stay out of jail. I have wore your second-hand clothes…I have done my best to get along in your world and now you want to kill me, and I look at you, and then I say to myself, You want to kill me? Ha! I’m already dead, have been all my life. I’ve spent twenty-three years in tombs that you built.

Look down at me and you see a fool; look up at me and you see a god; look straight at me and you see yourself

No sense makes sense.” Charles Manson

It bothered me in a kind of Charles Manson way to have a brown smear of blood on my wall but I also liked it because every time I looked at it I was reminded that I was, at that very moment, not bleeding from my face. And those are powerful words of hope, really.

I'd take this book and beat you to death with it, and I wouldn't feel a thing.

He felt that anything he wanted ought to be his no matter what.

Michael rolled his eyes. "Yeah, I'm a real catch. I'm shocked they're not lined up at the door." Gabriel reached out and gave his ponytail a yank. "Maybe if you didn't look like Charles Manson, they would be." "I do not look like Charles Manson." Gabriel gestured at the door. "Go tap-tap on your lap top and look him up. Dead ringer." Michael laughed.

it seems a shame to have to sneak to get to the truth.To make the truth such a dirty old nasty thing.You gotta sneak to get to the truth, the truth is condemned.The truth is in the gas chamber.The truth has been in your stockyards.Your slaughterhouses.The truth has been in your reservations, building your railroads, emtying your garbage.The truth is in your ghettos.In your jails.In your young love,not in your courts or congress where the old set judgement on the young.What the hell do the old know about the young?They put a picture of old George on the dollar and tell you that he's your father, worship him.Look at the madness that goes on, you can't prove anything that happened yesterday.Now is the only thing that's real.Everyday, every reality is a new reality.Every new reality is a new horizon,a brand new experience of living.I got a note last night from a friend of mine.He writes in this note that he's afraid of what he might have to do in order to save his reality, as i save mine.You can't prove anything.There's nothing to prove.Every man judges himself.He knows what he is. You know what you are, as i know what i am,we all know what we are.Nobody can stand in judgement, they can play like they're standing in judgement.They can play like they stand in judgement and take you off and control the masses, with your human body.They can lock you up in penitentiaries and cages and put you in crosses like they did in the past,but it doesn't amount to anything. What they're doing is, they're only persecuting a reflection of themselves. They're persecuting what they can't stand to look at in themselves,the truth.

I know this: that in your own hearts and your own souls, you are as much responsible for the Vietnam War as I am for killing these people.

The children of the 1960's that you call the 'Manson Family' wanted to stop a war and turn the government and world to peace. They gave their lives when they took lives and they knew it.

When a friend of mine boasted about living in a gated community, I thought he meant Folsom, and I wondered whether he knew Charles Manson.

If Dan had ever wanted anything more, then I had killed that by ignoring him at Abbott's. That had been my one chance to confront him not as warring reenactors, but as two people, a girl and a boy, and I had killed it. I am the Charles Manson of relationships.

You can see the same immorality or amorality in the Christian view of guilt and punishment. There are only two texts, both of them extreme and mutually contradictory. The Old Testament injunction is the one to exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (it occurs in a passage of perfectly demented detail about the exact rules governing mutual ox-goring; you should look it up in its context (Exodus 21). The second is from the Gospels and says that only those without sin should cast the first stone. The first is a moral basis for capital punishment and other barbarities; the second is so relativistic and "nonjudgmental" that it would not allow the prosecution of Charles Manson. Our few notions of justice have had to evolve despite these absurd codes of ultra vindictiveness and ultracompassion.

Death is peace from this world's madness and paradise in my own self. Death as I lay in my grave of constant vibration, endless now

So what you're left with is: either Christ was who He said He was—the Messiah—or a complete nutcase. I mean, we're talking nutcase on the level of Charles Manson. - Bono on whether Jesus was Son of God was far-fetched.

If anything was certain, it was that there would always be people looking for someone to tell them what to believe in and what to do.

Prison is a frame of thought, we’re all our own prisons, were each our own wardens and we do our own time. See prison in your mind, can’t you see I’m free?

Look down on me and you see a fool, look up at me and you see a god. Look straight at me and you see yourself.

Whenever people unquestioningly turn over their minds to authoritarian figures to do with as they please—whether it be in a satanic cult or some of the more fanatic offshoots of the Jesus Movement, in the right wing or the far left, or in the mind-bending cults of the new sensitivity—those potentials exist. One hopes that none of these groups will spawn other Charles Mansons.

I was taught by my father to be afraid of the world, and some of the lessons stuck. I read about Patty Hearst and the Zodiac Killer and the massacre at the Munich Olympics and Charles Manson, and I knew the world was a terrifying place. He said it all of the time, reminded me that mountains could blow up and kill people in their sleep. Governments were corrupt. A flu could come out of nowhere and kill millions. A nuclear bomb could fall at any second, obliterating everything.

In years to come, Jim Jones would frequently be compared to murderous demagogues such as Adolf Hitler and Charles Manson. These comparisons completely misinterpret, and historically misrepresent, the initial appeal of Jim Jones to members of Peoples Temple. Jones attracted followers by appealing to their better instincts. The purpose of Peoples Temple was to offer such a compelling example of living in racial and economic equality that everyone else would be won over and want to live the same way.

They were suffering from a diminished heart, a diminished soul.

It was not a Zodiac attack until the Zodiac said it was a Zodiac attack.

Prison is a frame of thought, we’re all our own prisons, were each our own wardens and we do our own time. See prison is in your mind, can’t you see I’m free?

Memories fade, but trauma remembers. It is stored in your body, your senses, your synapses and cells.

Charles Manson was there, the x on his forehead healed

Look down on me, you will see a fool. Look up at me, you will see your Lord. Look straight at me, you will see yourself. —Charles Manson

With Eyes Like Charles Manson, a life similar to H.P Lovecraft, and lyrics like Edgar Allan Poe, Kurt Cobain was the master of horror in music.

Asking me not to break the rules of society is like telling your kid not to eat candy because it’s bad for him. The kid will continue to eat candy until you take it away, or until you prove why he shouldn’t. You also need to provide substitutes for the candy you have denied that child. I was told often enough what was bad, but I was never given a substitute or the opportunity to try another world until I had already become so defiant and twisted, I no longer cared about someone else’s right or wrong. By then I could not see enough honest faces in the world to pattern myself after. Your Bibles didn’t mean anything to me. A Bible had driven my mother from her home. The people you chose to raise me beat and raped me and taught me to hate and fear. From what I have seen throughout my life, the laws of the land are practiced only by the little guy. Those who have money and success abuse every law written and get away with it. I admit my reasoning comes from the wrong side of the tracks, but once these opinions are formed and reinforced a few times, it is hard to believe otherwise. So even if I don’t shed a tear, I console myself: I had some help in becoming the person I am.

got treatment. I worked hard—I did the work. I got well again, Arwen. I was a child. Twelve. I was confused, unwell, and I’d come under the spell of a twisted, Charles Manson–like young man. A Paul Bernardo.

Of course he’s fucking better than you. Because he wants a real relationship with me.” I’m conveniently ignoring the fact that I’ve only just met Richard, and would rather form a relationship with Charles Manson.

You could be Charles Manson, or Hitler, or even a lawyer who advertises on television, and your dog will still think you're the greatest thing ever. This tells you something very important about dogs: They are not very bright.

She turned to the back section about the trials, and read about Charles Manson getting sentenced to death over and over again as if it were a bedtime story. She needed to reassure herself that not all men got away with it, not every time.

I’m the king of crime. I’m the criminal. I’m the juvenile delinquent, the rebel, the outcast, the unwanted. I’m everything that everybody looks down on and is standing on, spitting on, cursing and calling names, and hating, buying and selling all the different things.

As far as evil goes”—she shrugged one shoulder—“I’ve spent a dozen years studying the subject and there’s one thing I know for sure.” Her expression grew distant, breakable somehow. She blinked and seemed to push whatever had distracted her aside. “If you want to know what evil looks like, look in the mirror.” She leaned down, flattened her hands on the table once more, and went face-to-face with Wells. “Any one of us is capable of evil, Detective. We all have a line. It’s not crossing it that separates us from the Ed Geins and Charles Mansons of the world.

I once used "Astral Travel" in the ad... I'd come up with nothing, other than a few scary people... I really didn't have the heart to tell that one girl that Charles Manson wasn't dead yet, even though she really looked the part, right down to the swastika on her forehead and the beard.

Im Nachhinein betrachtet habe ich denselben strategischen Fehler wie Charles Manson begangen. Ich hätte aufhören sollen, solange ich noch bloß eine stinknormale Tiersex- und Drogensüchtige war, aber nein, ich musste meinen Status zu einer potentiell messerschwingenden Psychopathin steigern

Most people don’t get (or want) to look at old news footage, but we looked at thirty years of stories relating to motherhood. In the 1970s, with the exception of various welfare reform proposals, there was almost nothing in the network news about motherhood, working mothers, or childcare. And when you go back and watch news footage from 1972, for example, all you see is John Chancellor at NBC in black and white reading the news with no illustrating graphics, or Walter Cronkite sitting in front of a map of the world that one of the Rugrats could have drawn–that’s it. But by the 1980s, the explosion in the number of working mothers, the desperate need for day care, sci-fi level reproductive technologies, the discovery of how widespread child abuse was–all this was newsworthy. At the same time, the network news shows were becoming more flashy and sensationalistic in their efforts to compete with tabloid TV offerings like A Current Affair and America’s Most Wanted. NBC, for example introduced a story about day care centers in 1984 with a beat-up Raggedy Ann doll lying limp next to a chair with the huge words Child Abuse scrawled next to her in what appeared to be Charles Manson’s handwriting. So stories that were titillating, that could be really tarted up, that were about children and sex, or children and violence–well, they just got more coverage than why Senator Rope-a-Dope refused to vote for decent day care. From the McMartin day-care scandal and missing children to Susan Smith and murdering nannies, the barrage of kids-in-jeopardy, ‘innocence corrupted’ stories made mothers feel they had to guard their kids with the same intensity as the secret service guys watching POTUS.

Truman Capote : What is your own sense of morality? How do you differentiate between good and bad? Robert Beausoleil (a close associate of Charles Manson) : Good and bad? It’s all good. If it happens, it’s got to be good. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be happening. It’s just the way life flows. Moves together. I move with it. I don’t question it.

Manson liked to brag that prison was his daddy and the street was his mother.

I’d come to feel like a prisoner of my own story.

According to detectives, the footage, clearly filmed by Polanski, depicted Sharon Tate being forced to have sex with two men.

if Polanski had coerced Sharon into sleeping with two men, and filmed it, wasn’t that spousal abuse? “Roman’s a sicko,” Bugliosi had said. “He was making her do it.

The only thing that makes reality is death; then they hang it on a cross, kneel down and pray to it.

The real danger wasn’t violence like you saw on the television news, random and exciting—the real danger was the vampiric kind, the sort that you invited in because it told you everything you wanted to hear. Charles Manson could never have been Charles Manson if there hadn’t been girls by the dozen, ready and willing, scarred by the silent cruelty behind those carefully locked doors.

Memories fade, but trauma remembers. It is stored in your body, your senses, your synapses and cells. It would take strength to tell my story, but more importantly, it would take strength to tell myself, and to remember.

On the contrary, I’m too weak for it. I mean, everyone is, but I am especially susceptible to its false rewards, you know? It’s designed to addict you, to prey on your insecurities and use them to make you stay. It exploits everybody’s loneliness and promises us community, approval, friendship. Honestly, in that sense, social media is a lot like the Church of Scientology. Or QAnon. Or Charles Manson. And then on top of that—weaponizing a person’s isolation—it convinces every user that she is a minor celebrity, forcing her to curate some sparkly and artificial sampling of her best experiences, demanding a nonstop social performance that has little in common with her inner life, intensifying her narcissism, multiplying her anxieties, narrowing her worldview. All while commodifying her, harvesting her data, and selling it to nefarious corporations so that they can peddle more shit that promises to make her prettier, smarter, more productive, more successful, more beloved. And throughout all this, you have to act stupefied by your own good luck. Everybody’s like, Words cannot express how fortunate I feel to have met this amazing group of people, blah blah blah. It makes me sick. Everybody influencing, everybody under the influence, everybody staring at their own godforsaken profile, searching for proof that they’re lovable. And then, once you’re nice and distracted by the hard work of tallying up your failures and comparing them to other people’s triumphs, that’s when the algorithmic predators of late capitalism can pounce, enticing you to partake in consumeristic, financially irresponsible forms of so-called self-care, which is really just advanced selfishness. Facials! Pedicures! Smoothie packs delivered to your door! And like, this is just the surface stuff. The stuff that oxidizes you, personally. But a thousand little obliterations add up, you know? The macro damage that results is even scarier. The hacking, the politically nefarious robots, opinion echo chambers, fearmongering, erosion of truth, etcetera, etcetera. And don’t get me started on the destruction of public discourse. I mean, that’s just my view. Obviously to each her own. But personally, I don’t need it. Any of it.” Blandine cracks her neck. “I’m corrupt enough.

Here’s the thing about birthdays. Your dad didn’t pull out. You didn’t do shit. You didn’t earn anything. I’ll tell you who else has or had birthday celebrations each year: Charles Manson, Jim Jones, Osama bin Laden, Pol Pot, Jeremy Piven, and Ted Bundy. All the people you hate in life, all the pedophiles, all the murderers, all the IRS auditors have birthdays. I don’t think we should celebrate Idi Amin’s birthday and I don’t think we should celebrate yours either.

It was thus that in the second half of 1969—amid the static of Woodstock, Chappaquiddick, Vietnam War protests, Charles Manson, the Chicago Eight trial, and Altamont—the culmination was reached for three historic enterprises, each in the making for almost a decade. NASA was able to send a man to the moon. Engineers in Silicon Valley were able to devise a way to put a programmable computer on a chip called a microprocessor. And ARPA created a network that could connect distant computers. Only the first of these (perhaps the least historically significant of them?) made headlines. THE

Charlie’s uncanny ability to access a person’s needs now has many labels such as a type of cognitive empathy, this ability to read others and know them better than they know themselves without the emotional empathy to go along with it. Charlie provided scientists with a prime example of this type of pathology.

The mythicised inhumanity of this attack remains unforgettable not only because it was performed by one mother on another mother – one dark and distorted, the other fair and privileged – but because it encoded the relationship between patriarchal masculinity, drugs, and the resulting – and accelerating – cultural denigration of the feminine and maternal.

They’re just the little people. Unknown all their lives and forgotten as soon as they die. If anyone talks about them, they’re simply called the victim. But the killers, that’s something else! They don’t work or pay taxes or obey the law or live quiet lives of frustration. That’s not news. Instead they kill. That makes them special. Charles Manson will be remembered and written about a hundred years from now, just as Jack the Ripper is remembered a hundred years after his crimes. Everybody wants a little recognition. More things are done for sheer recognition than for money or sex, as far as I can see. But the only ones who get it are the killers. Who knows all the names of Manson’s victims? Or Jack the Ripper’s victims? Or Charles Starkweather’s victims? Or Caryl Chessman’s victims? Who cares? They were just people.

As I discovered that first day in his magic bus, when he focused his attention on you, he made you believe there was no one else in the world. He also had the uncanny sensibility bestowed upon mystics, yet misused by sociopaths and con men, to know exactly what you needed. Charlie knew what you were afraid of, and could paint a scenario that would use all those insights to his advantage—traits that I would see in equal parts over time.

Less than three weeks earlier, NASA had put the first man on the moon, an awe-inspiring testament to technological ingenuity. Conversely, the number one song in the country was Zager and Evans’s “In the Year 2525,” which imagined a dystopian future where you “ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies / Everything you think, do, and say / Is in the pill you took today.” It would prove to be a more trenchant observation about the present moment than anyone would’ve thought.

Whenever I do something, I don’t ever get caught. People don’t know what I do. I don’t let them know what I do. If I let you know what I do then I can’t do it. I’m the sons of liberty in the graveyard. That’s my gang. My gang is crooks. That’s my family, that’s my cult. That’s what we were convicted for. You just seen a little bit of it. You didn’t see what was really going on. See, with what really goes on I don’t need to break the law. The law’s kind of stupid actually. You know, I’m not conspiring with nobody to do anything.

This is an enormous claim, but there is a certain logic to it. One of the most recent people to note this logic is Bono, the lead singer of U2, in a conversation with Michka Assayas: Assayas: Christ has his rank among the world’s great thinkers. But Son of God, isn’t that far-fetched? Bono: No, it’s not far-fetched to me. Look, the secular response to the Christ story always goes like this: He was a great prophet, obviously a very interesting guy, had a lot to say along the lines of other great prophets, be they Elijah, Muhammad, Buddha, or Confucius. But actually Christ doesn’t allow you that. He doesn’t let you off that hook. Christ says, No. I’m not saying I’m a teacher, don’t call me teacher. I’m not saying I’m a prophet. I’m saying: ‘I’m the Messiah.’ I’m saying: ‘I am God incarnate.’ And people say: No, no, please, just be a prophet. A prophet we can take. You’re a bit eccentric. We’ve had John the Baptist eating locusts and wild honey, we can handle that. But don’t mention the ‘M’ word! Because, you know, we’re gonna have to crucify you. And he goes: No, no, I know you’re expecting me to come back with an army and set you free from these creeps, but actually I am the Messiah. At this point, everyone starts staring at their shoes, and says: Oh, my God, he’s gonna keep saying this. So what you’re left with is either Christ was who He said He was – the Messiah – or a complete nutcase. I mean, we’re talking nutcase on the level of Charles Manson. . . . I’m not joking here. The idea that the entire course of civilisation for over half of the globe could have its fate changed and turned upside-down by a nutcase, for me that’s far-fetched . . . Bono is describing how Jesus’ statements about himself force us all into an all-or-nothing choice.

I hung up the phone after saying good night to Marlboro Man, this isolated cowboy who hadn’t had the slightest probably picking up the phone to say “I miss you.” I shuddered at the thought of how long I’d gone without it. And judging from the electrical charges searing through every cell of my body, I realized just how fundamental a human need it really is. It was as fundamental a human need, I would learn, as having a sense of direction in the dark. I suddenly realized I was lost on the long dirt road, more lost than I’d ever been before. The more twists and turns I took in my attempt to find my bearings, the worse my situation became. It was almost midnight, and it was cold, and each intersection looked like the same one repeating over and over. I found myself struck with an illogical and indescribable panic--the kind that causes you to truly believe you’ll never, ever escape from where you are, even though you almost always will. As I drove, I remembered every horror movie I’d ever watched that had taken place in a rural setting. Children of the Corn. The children of the corn were lurking out there in the tall grass, I just knew it. Friday the 13th. Sure, it had taken place at a summer camp, but the same thing could happen on a cattle ranch. And The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? Oh no. I was dead. Leatherface was coming--or even worse, his freaky, emaciated, misanthropic brother. I kept driving for a while, then stopped on the side of the road. Shining my brights on the road in front of me, I watched out for Leatherface while dialing Marlboro Man on my car phone. My pulse was rapid out of sheer terror and embarrassment; my face was hot. Lost and helpless on a county road the same night I’d emotionally decompensated in his kitchen--this was not exactly the image I was dying to project to this new man in my life. But I had no other option, short of continuing to drive aimlessly down one generic road after another or parking on the side of the road and going to sleep, which really wasn’t an option at all, considering Norman Bates was likely wandering around the area. With Ted Bundy. And Charles Manson. And Grendel.

I mean, everyone is, but I am especially susceptible to its false rewards, you know? It’s designed to addict you, to prey on your insecurities and use them to make you stay. It exploits everybody’s loneliness and promises us community, approval, friendship. Honestly, in that sense, social media is a lot like the Church of Scientology. Or QAnon. Or Charles Manson. And then on top of that—weaponizing a person’s isolation—it convinces every user that she is a minor celebrity, forcing her to curate some sparkly and artificial sampling of her best experiences, demanding a nonstop social performance that has little in common with her inner life, intensifying her narcissism, multiplying her anxieties, narrowing her worldview. All while commodifying her, harvesting her data, and selling it to nefarious corporations so that they can peddle more shit that promises to make her prettier, smarter, more productive, more successful, more beloved. And throughout all this, you have to act stupefied by your own good luck. Everybody’s like, Words cannot express how fortunate I feel to have met this amazing group of people, blah blah blah. It makes me sick. Everybody influencing, everybody under the influence, everybody staring at their own godforsaken profile, searching for proof that they’re lovable. And then, once you’re nice and distracted by the hard work of tallying up your failures and comparing them to other people’s triumphs, that’s when the algorithmic predators of late capitalism can pounce, enticing you to partake in consumeristic, financially irresponsible forms of so-called self-care, which is really just advanced selfishness. Facials! Pedicures! Smoothie packs delivered to your door! And like, this is just the surface stuff. The stuff that oxidizes you, personally. But a thousand little obliterations add up, you know? The macro damage that results is even scarier. The hacking, the politically nefarious robots, opinion echo chambers, fearmongering, erosion of truth, etcetera, etcetera. And don’t get me started on the destruction of public discourse. I mean, that’s just my view. Obviously to each her own. But personally, I don’t need it. Any of it.” Blandine cracks her neck. “I’m corrupt enough.

In the meantime, I tried my best to acclimate to my new life in the middle of nowhere. I had to get used to the fact that I lived twenty miles from the nearest grocery store. That I couldn’t just run next door when I ran out of eggs. That there was no such thing as sushi. Not that it would matter, anyway. No cowboy on the ranch would touch it. That’s bait, they’d say, laughing at any city person who would convince themselves that such a food was tasty. And the trash truck: there wasn’t one. In this strange new land, there was no infrastructure for dealing with trash. There were cows in my yard, and they pooped everywhere--on the porch, in the yard, even on my car if they happened to be walking near it when they dropped a load. There wasn’t a yard crew to clean it up. I wanted to hire people, but there were no people. The reality of my situation grew more crystal clear every day. One morning, after I choked down a bowl of cereal, I looked outside the window and saw a mountain lion siting on the hood of my car, licking his paws--likely, I imagined, after tearing a neighboring rancher’s wife from limb to limb and eating her for breakfast. I darted to the phone and called Marlboro Man, telling him there was a mountain lion sitting on my car. My heart beat inside my chest. I had no idea mountain lions were indigenous to the area. “It’s probably just a bobcat,” Marlboro Man reassured me. I didn’t believe him. “No way--it’s huge,” I cried. “It’s seriously got to be a mountain lion!” “I’ve gotta go,” he said. Cows mooed in the background. I hung up the phone, incredulous at Marlboro Man’s lack of concern, and banged on the window with the palm of my hand, hoping to scare the wild cat away. But it only looked up and stared at me through the window, imagining me on a plate with a side of pureed trout. My courtship with Marlboro Man, filled with fizzy romance, hadn’t prepared me for any of this; not the mice I heard scratching in the wall next to my bed, not the flat tires I got from driving my car up and down the jagged gravel roads. Before I got married, I didn’t know how to use a jack or a crowbar…and I didn’t want to have to learn now. I didn’t want to know that the smell in the laundry room was a dead rodent. I’d never smelled a dead rodent in my life: why, when I was supposed to be a young, euphoric newlywed, was I being forced to smell one now? During the day, I was cranky. At night, I was a mess. I hadn’t slept through the night once since we returned from our honeymoon. Besides the nausea, whose second evil wave typically hit right at bedtime, I was downright spooked. As I lay next to Marlboro Man, who slept like a baby every night, I thought of monsters and serial killers: Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers, Ted Bundy and Charles Manson. In the utter silence of the country, every tiny sound was amplified; I was certain if I let myself go to sleep, the murderer outside our window would get me.

I kept driving for a while, then stopped on the side of the road. Shining my brights on the road in front of me, I watched out for Leatherface while dialing Marlboro Man on my car phone. My pulse was rapid out of sheer terror and embarrassment; my face was hot. Lost and helpless on a county road the same night I’d emotionally decompensated in his kitchen--this was not exactly the image I was dying to project to this new man in my life. But I had no other option, short of continuing to drive aimlessly down one generic road after another or parking on the side of the road and going to sleep, which really wasn’t an option at all, considering Norman Bates was likely wandering around the area. With Ted Bundy. And Charles Manson. And Grendel. Marlboro Man answered, “Hello?” He must have been almost asleep. “Um…um…hi,” I said, squinting in shame. “Hey there,” he replied. “This is Ree,” I said. I just wanted to make sure he knew. “Yeah…I know,” he said. “Um, funniest thing happened,” I continued, my hands in a death grip on the steering wheel. “Seems I got a little turned around and I’m kinda sorta maybe perhaps a little tiny bit lost.” He chuckled. “Where are you?” “Um, well, that’s just it,” I replied, looking around the utter darkness for any ounce of remaining pride. “I don’t really know.” Marlboro Man assumed control, telling me to drive until I found an intersection, then read him the numbers on the small green county road sign, numbers that meant absolutely nothing to me, considering I’d never even heard the term “county road” before, but that would help Marlboro Man pinpoint exactly where on earth I was. “Okay, here we go,” I called out. “It says, um…CR 4521.” “Hang tight,” he said. “I’ll be right there.” Marlboro Man was right there, in less than five minutes. Once I determined the white pickup pulling beside my car was his and not that of Jason Voorhees, I rolled down my window. Marlboro Man did the same and said, with a huge smile, “Having trouble?” He was enjoying this, in the exact same way he’d enjoyed waking me from a sound sleep when he’d called at seven a few days earlier. I was having no trouble establishing myself as the clueless pansy-ass of our rapidly developing relationship. “Follow me,” he said. I did. I’ll follow you anywhere, I thought as I drove in the dust trail behind his pickup. Within minutes we were back at the highway and I heaved a sigh of relief that I was going to survive. Humiliated and wanting to get out of his hair, I intended to give him a nice, simple wave and drive away in shame. Instead, I saw Marlboro Man walking toward my car. Staring at his Wranglers, I rolled down my window again so I could hear what he had to say. He didn’t say anything at all. He opened my car door, pulled me out of the car, and kissed me as I’d never been kissed before. And there we were. Making out wildly at the intersection of a county road and a rural highway, dust particles in the air mixing with the glow of my headlights to create a cattle ranch version of London fog. It would have made the perfect cover of a romance novel had it not been for the fact that my car phone, suddenly, began ringing loudly.

FACT 4 – There is more to the creation of the Manson Family and their direction than has yet been exposed. There is more to the making of the movie Gimme Shelter than has been explained. This saga has interlocking links to all the beautiful people Robert Hall knew. The Manson Family and the Hell’s Angels were instruments to turn on enemy forces. They attacked and discredited politically active American youth who had dropped out of the establishment. The violence came down from neo-Nazis, adorned with Swastikas both in L.A. and in the Bay Area at Altamont. The blame was placed on persons not even associated with the violence. When it was all over, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were the icing on this cake, famed musicians associated with a racist, neo-Nazi murder. By rearranging the facts, cutting here and there, distorting evidence, neighbors and family feared their own youth. Charles Manson made the cover of Life with those wide eyes, like Rasputin. Charles Watson didn’t make the cover. Why not? He participated in all the killings. Manson wasn’t inside the house. Manson played a guitar and made records. Watson didn’t. He was too busy taking care of matters at the lawyer’s office prior to the killings, or with officials of Young Republicans. Who were Watson’s sponsors in Texas, where he remained until his trial, separate from the Manson Family’s to psychologically distance him from the linking of Watson to the murders he actually committed. “Pigs” was scrawled in Sharon Tate’s house in blood. Was this to make blacks the suspects? Credit cards of the La Bianca family were dropped intentionally in the ghetto after the massacre. The purpose was to stir racial fears and hatred. Who wrote the article, “Did Hate Kill Tate?”—blaming Black Panthers for the murders? Lee Harvey Oswald was passed off as a Marxist. Another deception. A pair of glasses was left on the floor of Sharon Tate’s home the day of the murder. They were never identified. Who moved the bodies after the killers left, before the police arrived? The Spahn ranch wasn’t a hippie commune. It bordered the Krupp ranch, and has been incorporated into a German Bavarian beer garden. Howard Hughes knew George Spahn. He visited this ranch daily while filming The Outlaw. Howard Hughes bought the 516 acres of Krupp property in Nevada after he moved into that territory. What about Altamont? What distortions and untruths are displayed in that movie? Why did Mick Jagger insist, “the concert must go on?” There was a demand that filmmakers be allowed to catch this concert. It couldn’t have happened the same in any other state. The Hell’s Angels had a long working relationship with law enforcement, particularly in the Oakland area. They were considered heroes by the San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers when they physically assaulted the dirty anti-war hippies protesting the shipment of arms to Vietnam. The laboratory for choice LSD, the kind sent to England for the Stones, came from the Bay Area and would be consumed readily by this crowd. Attendees of the concert said there was “a compulsiveness to the event.” It had to take place. Melvin Belli, Jack Ruby’s lawyer, made the legal arrangements. Ruby had complained that Belli prohibited him from telling the full story of Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder (another media event). There were many layers of cover-up, and many names have reappeared in subsequent scripts. Sen. Philip Hart, a member of the committee investigating illegal intelligence operations inside the US, confessed that his own children told him these things were happening. He had refused to believe them. On November 18, 1975, Sen. Hart realized matters were not only out of hand, but crimes of the past had to be exposed to prevent future outrages. How shall we ensure that it will never happen again? It will happen repeatedly unless we can bring ourselves to understand and accept that it did go on.

As long as the law, the people representing the law, as long as they abide by the law they represent, they’re in a safe zone, nobody has any power over them, but when they break the law and they’re representative of the law then they have the outlaw that’s going to get them.

Prison is, you don’t judge people, you accept them. If they get out of line you knock them out. When in doubt, you punch them, you punch them as quick as you can, and as fast as you can, and you knock them out.

The Manson Family changed the whole world. But they won’t even accept that, you know. The whole thing is turning out crazy. I just say fuck it, run away, and hide.

You know, when you’re in jail with a whole bunch of people who think they did bad and think they got wrong coming, they think they got bad coming and they wish bad on everything, because they feel guilty about all the stuff they’ve done. It’s difficult to live in an area like that because you got to be on the defensive with everybody and you can’t trust anybody about anything because they are all lying to you, cheating you, getting you every way they can. And you’ve really got no such thing as a friend and brother, and honor seems to be a joke that died in someforeign war before you were born, and there’s nobody here.