> I am never here …. Never that is fully in possession, but somehow in a position to forestall ill-advised moves…. Patrolling is, in fact, my principal occupation….. No matter how tight Security, I am always somewhere Outside giving orders and Inside this strait jacket of jelly that gives and stretches but always reforms ahead of every movement, thought, impulse, stamped with the seal of alien inspection….
Alcohol, probably. Maybe also/or heroin. And he'd just returned from South America, where he'd been chasing (unsuccessfully, I've read) some young guy. And where he did, I gather, ayahuasca, maybe a few times. So he was probably crazier than usual.
But anyway, it was indeed horrible that he shot his wife. But for whatever it's worth, it was a formative event in his career as a writer. As I recall, he credited it as the formative event in his career.
And to your point, it was arguably one of the things that he had in mind when writing that.
> I am never here …. Never that is fully in possession, but somehow in a position to forestall ill-advised moves…. Patrolling is, in fact, my principal occupation….. No matter how tight Security, I am always somewhere Outside giving orders and Inside this strait jacket of jelly that gives and stretches but always reforms ahead of every movement, thought, impulse, stamped with the seal of alien inspection….
http://www.madnessandliterature.org/literature.php?id=26&res...
The "alien inspection" reference is about Scientology, I think.