#jitting

VintageTIRE: So, I have a few more questions, if that's ok.

JIT: Sure. It's weird to need to explain some of this stuff. I seem to have literally outlived my infamy.

VintageTIRE: What does "The God of the king is going into the lion's body" even mean? What hat does a nine year old pull a line like that out of?

JIT: A trilby? I dunno.

VintageTIRE: The picture you drew in Sunday School that day...it could be interpreted as an action scene that any kid might have drawn. But those words, to me, are what makes it weird.

JIT: See, among the Jitters, you'd be a word guy. There were word guys, like Klinefort and Riggel. They thought, like you, that the mojo was all in the words. Riggel though the picture was irrelevant to the point of distraction. He offered a bounty of a hundred bucks to destroy my original picture, he was so militant about it.

VintageTIRE: Did anyone try to take him up on it?

JIT: Yeah, me. I sent him a letter saying for a hundred bucks I'll tear it up. For postage, you can have the shreds. But, he never replied.

VintageTIRE: An empty promise?

JIT: It's the one thing all the Jitters agree on. They never ever want contact from me. Anything I initiate is automatically out of bounds. Riggel was willing to pay someone to break into my folks' house and destroy it, but if the JIT offers to do it...

VintageTIRE: So, besides word guys there were...

JIT: Oh. Word guys, then obviously there are image guys. They were the really weird ones. Some were all about the color choices, others went on about shapes. One guy, Herseling, was obsessed with finding out the brand of markers I drew the picture with. He thought he could access more knowledge than I did by sniffing them and then drawing with them.

VintageTIRE: How did that go for him? I don't recognize that name from any TIREs I read.

JIT: Beats me. '70s markers were heady little suckers. Anybody huffing those could stroke out.

VintageTIRE: I remember an article by Erlong Schrift called "The Drawing Above." I read it twice and I felt like I broke my ability to think straight. It was like my ability to concentrate had gotten blurry.

JIT: That guy could have gotten himself a following if anyone could've made hide or hair of his babble. My takeaway was that hidden a micrometer above my drawing is a plane of spacetime that holds the next drawing, the one undrawn by me. As I drew the original, the drawing above was undrawn. Like reverse causation. Destroying the original would remove both drawings from spacetime. If the real drawing were undrawn, taken back up into the markers, I guess, the next drawing would be revealed to us. It's one of those theories that sounds unassailable, because there's no way to disprove it.

VintageTIRE: Yeah that still makes no sense to me.

JIT: It's easier to follow along when they're talking about you. The ego finds a way to make sense of it. Hey, I gotta go. Be sure to mention that TIRE, June 2000 comes out August 1 and that it'll be available wherever books are sold.

Coming August 1, 2016 is TIRE, June 2000. Candle Light Press has been granted special permission to reprint the last issue of the Arthur Peyton Corley era of TIRE, guest edited by John Ira Thomas. John has written a new essay for it, but it is otherwise the same issue of TIRE that hit the stands after Arthur Peyton Corley’s death and the magazine’s subsequent transformation back into the tire industry journal it was before.

The issue brought to an end an era of New Age interest in a drawing John had made for Sunday School when he was nine. Seekers with an interest in the Mysteries saw a special truth in this drawing, which had gotten young John disinvited from future Sunday Schools. Back in 1978, TIRE got hold of this story, and didn’t let go until John himself (with an assist from Ruth Corley Watt) closed the doors on the magazine that hounded him for twenty-two years. Actually, that’s not quite fair. Ruth closed the doors, using John as her implement.

JIT: Thanks for the suggestion that people buy TIRE June 2000. I'm gonna go out on a limb as a result and say you must not be a jitter.

VintageTIRE: Nope. An admirer of the phenomenon, yes. Are there still many followers of the JIT out there?

JIT: It's died down enough to the point where I think it's a good idea to reprint TIRE, June 2000. I thought that would never happen.

VintageTIRE: What made you want to reprint a complete issue of TIRE, much less this one?

JIT: I write a series of books called FRAGMENTA. Initially they were incomplete works, previously unpublished stories, that sort of thing. Seven volumes in, I started looking around for things. TIRE, June 2000 is a thing I did. Plus, my current readers are largely unaware of my past New Age notoriety.

VintageTIRE: So the whole staff of TIRE walked out when you were made Guest Editor of the June 2000 issue?

JIT: They walked out after I fired them, yeah. Actually, Ruth fired them. I was just the messenger, a very enthusiastic messenger.

VintageTIRE: And then you assembled the whole issue yourself.

JIT: Yep. Wrote a bunch of it, and put together the regular features by sifting through the slush pile. I even jitted some more. It was a long month. Those guys were still using PageMaker. Blech.

VintageTIRE: Any particular memories from that month you'd like to share?

JIT: Ruth put me up in a hotel in Akron that used to be grain silos for Quaker Oats. It's a dorm for the U of Akron now.(Go Zips!)I'd roll out of bed and walk down to the TIRE office on Corley St. and get to work. Living out of a hotel room for a month puts you apart from the world. About two weeks in one of the staff worked up the nerve to ask me to settle their bet. The big money was on me being an unacknowledged Corley family member who'd fallen on hard times. I told them I was the Guest Editor of TIRE for one month because the magazine had ruined my life and I was being given a chance to have my say. They had to cancel the pool and give all the money back.

VintageTIRE: It's hard to say it ruined your life at this point, though, isn't it?

JIT: It closed a few doors, but the ground below my feet was soft enough for me to tunnel out. When I got to college, I had visions of being a lawyer. But halfway through my 1st semester, I got it in my head that if I got a Philosophy degree, that I could arm myself to take on the jitters, TIRE, and everybody and beat them at their own game. It was my choice, but it was also a response to what they did to me. When people try to steal your hair, you have to do something.

VintageTIRE: Steal your hair? You can't just leave that out there.

JIT: I graduated from a high school in west Texas that had a hair code. Back of your 'do had to be an inch above a dress collar whether you were wearing one or not. I rebelled by not getting a haircut all Summer and into the first Fall of college. The jitters started calling it my mane and I had a few incidents where people would sneak up on me to clip a lock of my hair. I was in Lubbock, TX then, which is a hell of a lot bigger and more accessible than Perryton, TX. Things weren't so bad in Perryton. The remoteness and small size meant I could see jitters coming a mile away. But Lubbock was the big city.

VintageTIRE: Well that's simple assault. You didn't call the police?

JIT: "Hi, Police? Strangers are trying to steal my hair. Hello? Hello?"

VintageTIRE: Okay, it does sound strange when you put it like that.

JIT: I was painted into a corner by the JIT madness. How do you get people to see any of this from my point of view? There's a small dedicated group of people convinced that when I was nine I drew a picture that accessed ancient knowledge and they don't want anything from me except my hair.

VintageTIRE: And more knowledge, right?