Peter, Marcy, Jed, and Jay

Peter graduated from UC Berkeley in June, 1972. In early October of that year, he began working as a drug abuse counselor at a place called the Rising Sun Awareness House, in Tracy, CA. It was part of the Awareness House program, and one of several Awareness House locations in half a dozen states.

(History does not record the degree to which he continued to take drugs while working as a drug abuse counselor. I assume that he was regularly smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol, and possibly also smoking tobacco, during this time, but I don’t know for sure.)

The specific Awareness House where he worked was called Rising Sun Awareness House. But among the family letters, I found a legal-size page on which Peter had written a long list of “suggested names for the house where i work…,” which I feel like must have referred to R.S.A.H.

So I don’t know whether the “Rising Sun” name hadn’t been chosen yet when he wrote this list, or whether they were considering a name change, or whether this is for something entirely unrelated to R.S.A.H. But for now, I’m guessing it was written sometime in the fall of 1972.

A couple of further clues, which unfortunately hint in different directions:

• The abovelinked report mentions R.S.A.H. by name, and the report was the proceedings of a conference held in May of 1972, which I’m pretty sure was well before Peter knew he would be working there. So that seems to imply that R.S.A.H. was named before Peter worked there. (But it’s possible that the report was compiled some months after the conference.)
• Peter’s list was written on the back of an order form for Albany-Westbrae Bulk Goods, which I’m assuming was the name of the food co-op that we belonged to while we lived in Albany. So I would expect that this was during or after the time when we lived in Albany—and we lived there while Peter was a student and for only a few months afterward. We moved to Stockton (a half-hour drive from Tracy) in mid-September of 1972.

(I’m not transcribing the order form, but I’m including a photo of it in case any of you are interested; to see a larger version, click the thumbnail image on this page. I’m guessing that most of the prices are in cents per pound, but that’s just a guess.)

Anyway, here’s the list of names.

• elevation and range
• further house
• right ascension
• one giant step
• metamorphosis
• transfiguration
• the changes
• the wayhouse
• metanoia
• superogatory services
• the other side
• the polyphase transformer
• metempsychosis
• transmogrification
• the immanent domain
• the transcendental function
• the transition state
• perpetual revolution
• perpetually regenesis
• the magic touch
• fluid transmission
• transubstantiation
• the way out
• flux density
• potential difference
• psychoprophylaxis axis
• illuminous noumenous
• the fluke
• mutatis mutandis
• illumi-nation
• this enlightened age
• lighten the darkness
• catapulsion
• regeneration station
• the ascending node
• the beyond
• hyperboloidx of revolution
• the hyperbolic paraboloid
• the saddle-point
• the garden path
• the configuration
• the inner circle
• alter-nation
• alternative standard
• the Eleusinian mystery tour
• Elysium
• expansive radiance
• excelsior!
• the quantum leap
• the ontological mongoose
• the human metaphor
• the institute for participatory evolution
• super heterodyne
• the phase shift
• help yourself
• spontaneous remission
• eternal recurrence

…The dictation software I’m using, Dragon Anywhere, did a remarkably good job with this, though it (quite reasonably) didn’t get everything quite right. The mistake that I’m most amused by was transforming "super heterodyne” into “super hetero time.”