I’d been corresponding with Howard Bloom, legendary music business publicist and author of the mind blowing book, The Lucifer Principle, for about 5 weeks now, since we both were interviewed for Alex Burns's upcoming book, Mind Kampf. Alex, knowing that my own violently rejected religious upbringing in West Virginia closely resembled his similar boyhood in Australia, brought me into an email discussion he was having with Bloom that ranged from why Christians try to censor other social groups to how much we all admired Jello Biafra to Satanic cults Alex had either joined or at least obsessively researched. It was a lot of fun.

But I'd not yet met Bloom in person and so I wasn't prepared for the crazed energy that came leaping out of the phone line, practically grabbing me by the throat . (As I type this I wonder what could've possibly prepared me for the human tornado that is Howard Bloom and I must confess, I'm drawing a complete blank). It was an eccentric (and amusing) performance to be sure, but since I hadn't the vaguest notion of what his scene consisted of and he sounded like he'd just snorted a few fucking pounds of crystal meth, I mumbled a few syllables of positive encouragement and committed to nothing. I wasn't exactly in the mood for an Abel Ferarra kind of night, if you know what I mean, but since I'd been calling the guy a genius to all my friends and anyone who'd listen for a month now, I thought I'd at least listen to what he had to say.

And then it occurred to me: Didn't Howard Bloom develop such a bad case of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in the late 1980s that he had to suddenly retire from running his top rock and roll PR company? Wasn't the uber publicist of the rock era unable to move his jaw for longer than 10 minutes without completely wearing himself out? But this is a force of nature on the line. Hadn't he been horizontal for the better part of the last decade? Robin Williams himself would sit down and shut up if forced to share the same country with this guy

"Howard, you sound like you're on coke. A lot of it."

"That's what people used to always say to me when I was in the music industry. But I am a bit manic, tonight, yes. Well, two weeks ago (January 14th, 1998) I tried to commit suicide when the divorce proceedings with my wife, Linda became too much for me. I ate 80 Valium, fourteen Chlorpromazine, and gave myself an intramuscular injection of five cc of Lidocaine Hydrochloride, which according to my copy of the Physician's Desk Reference was an unequivocally fatal dose. I actually so close to dead that the Grim Reaper had digested my soul and was burping up the remains. For two and half days I lay in bed like a corpse, the blood pooling in my body and breaking out through the skin, almost like stigmata. When I woke up I'd lost the use of three limbs and 40% of my circulatory system. I've been experiencing the highest spiritual and intellectual highs and the lowest of the lows in roughly 15 minute cycles ever since. As a scientist, it's an incredible thing to witness, but being the person experiencing it, it really sucks. So I tried to kill myself. Yes, you could say I'm a little on edge, that's for sure.

"Anyway what I want to propose is this: You come out here to Brooklyn and baby-sit me. You keep me company and keep me distracted from thoughts of killing myself and I, for my part, will keep you entertained and be witty and funny and be a genius and, well, uh, that's the job if you choose to accept it. Let me entertain you, in other words. I guarantee it'll be pretty interesting. I really need human contact now. I could die and I'm afraid. I don't want to die. Not tonight. Not for a long time. But I need help. I need a baby sitter to keep me from killing myself. Does this sound like anything you'd be interested in participating in?"

It's difficult here to get across how utterly persuasive and yet how deeply desperate Bloom sounded that night. His rap was equal parts sheer force of personality, deft (even unfair) cajoling and flat out emotional blackmail, skills no doubt honed during his tenure as the top publicist in the music industry. It was a preposterous position to be put in. Resistance wasn't only futile, it wasn’t even an option.

I laughed.

"Well Howard, what you propose is indeed extremely extreme, so, yeah, why not? I'm game. When do you want me to come over?"

"Eleven. I need you to keep me company in the worst hours which are from 4 to 6 AM."

Howard Bloom's 1995 sleeper masterpiece, The Lucifer Principle (Atlantic Monthly Press) is now in its 8th printing and he's putting the final touches on a new book, The Global Brain, that furthers his startling and controversial new theories of evolutionary psychology. Armed with vivid examples combed with meticulous documentation from several scientific disciplines, Lucifer (and Bloom's embryonic science of Paleopsychology) takes its cue from Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, theorizing that evolution has organized mankind (and every other life form) into "super organisms" (think ant colonies and cell cultures and capitalism and devotion to a cause or religion and you'll be in the Bloomian ballpark) that compete with each other in an eternal biological conflict closely resembling something akin to St. Paul's conception of 'original sin.' War, death, hatred, violence and even racism are necessary underpinnings of the genetic plan -- integral component s of creation and of life itself. The Lucifer Principle asks why "our finest qualities often lead us to the actions we most abhor --murder, torture, genocide, and war" and answers it with the cold and clammy facts: Evil, according to Bloom, is an evolutionary imperative. In other words, we're genetically hardwired for it.