Stick it to the Man, One Last Time

A big piece of my formative years has just risen up out of the blue and informed me that it was dying. "Outlaw" publisher Loompanics Unlimited has just announced they are going out of business. An indie publisher and mail order bookstore, who offered titles like The Anarchist's Cookbook and How to Keep a Severed Head Alive, their catalog was as much fun as any of the books they published. Between Loompanics and High Weirdness by Mail (I don't recall which one lead me to the other), the early-to-mid 90s were a wonderfully skewed time in my life, in which I discovered Robert Anton Wilson and became an ordained minister courtesy of the Universal Life Church of Modesto, California (quite by accident I assure you.) Strange days indeed! Not a time I'd like to revisit necessarily, but I'm sad to see Loompanics go. Still, the sting is taken out of this passing by the Great Loompanics Going Out of Business Sale. I may have to order a book on how to build an orgone collector for old times sake.