John Perry Barlow, former rancher, internet freedom fighter and renowned songwriter reveals quite a lot in his latest blog entry. For one, we now know he attends Burning Man in the black rock desert of northwest Nevada (and here I thought only the cool kids were doing that). He goes on to tell how he’s fighting the Constitutionality of drug charges brought against him. He was taken off a plane bound for New York last year, after authorities allegedly found pot, ‘shrooms and Vitamin K in his suitcase.
Here’s a passage from his entry: I was stripped, cavity-searched, and eventually tossed into a small cell with a marvelously odd collection of California’s less fortunate. There I spent most of the remaining day, while I attempted to raise the truly astonishing $25,000 bail upon which my liberty now depended. Finding rescue was tricky. The “phone” in my cell could only make local or collect calls. I didn’t know anyone in Redwood City and cell phones won’t accept collect calls. Furthermore, they’d taken my address book and my cell phone and calls to directory information were not permitted. I was left with the few land line numbers I still keep in my head. Lunch consisted of a slice of baloney between two unadorned slices of Wonder Bread, but I didn’t have much appetite. At some point in the recent past, someone had thrown up in our cell and no one had bothered to clean it up. I was getting what Rudy Giuliani liked to call, during his tenure as the Mean Mom of New York, “a taste of the system.”