Sean Maccracken Massage in New SF Location

Dear Friends,

I have recently expanded my practice to a new location. On Sundays from 1 to 5 PM, I'll be offering table massage at Shoebox Studios www.damage-control.org/shoebox/ at 1049 Market Street in downtown SF. This is a great opportunity for you who live in the city to pamper yourself and unwind from a long work week with a soothing, invigorating massage session that will unravel those stressed muscles leave you feeling like a whole new person.

If you are in the city and have been unable to make it to my Oakland Studio for a session, now is your chance! Call my cell any time for an appointment, and I will return your call within 24 hours. Sessions are still available in the East Bay at my home studio in the Sunshine Biscuit Factory for those of you out here.

Also, as a special offer to my Tribe Community, just tell me you heard about it on Tribe and get $10 off your first session!

Namasté!

~Sean~
Sean Maccracken, C.M.T.
Sean.Maccracken@gmail.com
(510) 875-0107 (Cellphone)

Recent Reading

Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved:
A Chemical Love Story
By Alexander and Ann Shulgin

Deeply engrossing. Less for its gripping prose and more for its well-selected doses of historical perspective. Dr. Shulgin is the one who first synthesized MDMA, as well as countless obscure psychedelics. This first book deals largely with the phenethylamines -- mescaline and lsd-like substances. One half biography-fiction, and the other half do-it-yourself chemical recipies, its a fun read for anyone interested in delving beneath the surface of the psychedelic movement, both from a chemist's and a "field researcher's" perspective.

Alex's account is more episodic, and interesting for its insights into the research process, as well as some illuminating testimonials about various chemicals, and the research group that tests them. Ann's account follows more of a narrative, bringing a great deal of heart into the story. Many times in the course of reading her story, I couldn't help but think how much Alex sounded like a real bastard, but I suppose that adds a human element to round out the glamour of the lives of two of the SF bay area's underground folk heroes. The last few chapters of the first part center almost entirely on "bad" trips, which lends a further sense of balance. This is heartfelt, personal, thoughtful, and well-presented writing on the nature of the human mind.


A Scanner Darkly
Phlip K. Dick

Determined to finish the book before seeing the film, I pulled this one off the shelf where it'd been sitting with a queue of other old PKD paperbacks. Similar to <i>Androids</i>, it's a veil of quasi-cyberpunk, gritty, darkly humorous scifi, uncomfortably hung over a frame of paranoid and desperate grasping for ontological Truth. Fred/Bob Arctor is the undercover narcotics agent who surveils his own house, unaware that his drug addiction has severed his mind into two distinct personalities. The themes Dick is reaching for in this one remind me a lot of the concepts in the later Valis trilogy -- the polarization of the mind, the elusivity of true selfhood... In <i>Scanner</i> it is the self-annihilating drug culture, and not the demiurge, that acts as the primary barrier to self-realization. It's interesting, though, that at one point ancient Greece comes up, and it seems that the whole Gnostic mess that coughed itself up in PKD's brain must have been pushing its way to the surface all through the writing of <i>Scanner</I>. When did the whole pink laser beam thing happen anyway?

If nothing else, reading this was further evidence of the psuedobiographical thread that runs through the more esoteric, and less (purely) commercial, of PKDs work. It seems his body of writing must be taken as a whole in order to appreciate, if not entirely understand, some of the mind-rending concepts with which his gifted and troubled intellect seemed to be perpetually grappling until his death. This book was also notable for what I thought was the most fully developed PKD romance I've read to date, between Bob Arctor and Donna. Wholesome it is not, in fact Dick undercuts their futile romance ruthlessly by showing Arctor at his most vulnerable, twisted, and scorned, and then juxtaposing that with a scene between Arctor and a junkie girl in the very next scene. These pages are populated by such universally loathsome people with seemingly no escape from one another and, for Bob Arctor, no escape except into another self-hated-self. Chilling, when you think about it.

Win Free One Hour Massages For You And A Friend!

My Friends,

I am looking for a part-time day job to support my transition into a healing arts career. I intend to be building up a private massage practice within the next year or so, which requires a part-time day job. I am choosing to regard this day job as an opportunity to intern into a healing arts career. I know that people in my extended community have contact with a wide variety of the sorts of environments in which I hope to establish myself, so I want to ask everyone's help in building a list of contacts.

Here's how it works. You send me the names of five organizations that might make good employers for me, whether or not they may be hiring at the moment. These could be chiropractors, chinese, ayurvedic or acupuncture doctors, dance studios, yoga studios or other movement-based training centers. Basically anyplace that heals the body -- I want to know about it. I'm going to use this database as a basis to look for employment, either by seeking a job with the organization itself, or by seeking advice from the practitioners themselves.

If you send me five healing arts contacts and it leads to me getting the part-time job I need, I'll send you two gift certificates, each redeemable for a one-hour massage, good for the life of my massage career. That's right, people. All you do is cut and paste a few bytes of info to me, and you could get not one, but two free hour massages from yours truly.

So, what I need:

~Contact info for five healing arts organizations that might make good employers,
~Your full name and address.

Disclaimer -- out-of-area people are welcome to play, but the five contacts must be in the bay area. To redeem the gift certificate, you must also be in the bay area, but that's a different story.

Also, the rule is that The Partner gets free massage for life, so Wiljago is disqualified. Wiljago, you can still play the game, you just can't win. Or can't win any more than you have.