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541 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1971
I am admired and praised by thousands of dicepeople throughout the nation but have twice been a patient in a mental institution, once been in jail, and am currently a fugitive, which I hope to remain, Die willing, at least until I have completed this 379 page autobiography.
My primary profession has been psychiatry. My passion, both as psychiatrist and as Dice Man, has been to change human personality. Mine. Others’. Everyone’s.
Life is islands of ecstasy in an ocean of ennui, and after the age of thirty land is seldom seen. At best we wander from one much-worn sandbar to the next, soon familiar with each grain of sand we see.
‘We must be wrong. All psychotherapy is a tedious disaster. We must be making some fundamental, rock-bottom error that poisons all our thinking. Years from now men will look upon our therapeutic theories and our techniques as we do upon nineteenth-century bloodletting.’
Ego, my friends, ego. The more I sought to destroy it through the dice the greater it grew. Each tumble of a die chipped off another splinter of the old self to feed the growing tissues of the dice man ego.
Life is islands of ecstasy in an ocean of ennui, and after the age of thirty land is seldom seen.
“You know this hospital is a farce, but tragic, suffering—a tragic farce. You know there are nuts running this place—nuts!—not even counting you! [...] You know what American racism is. You know what the war in Vietnam is. And you toss dice! You toss dice!! [...]
I’m leaving. Thanks for the pot, thanks for the silences, thanks even for the games, but don’t say another word about tossing your fucking dice, or I’ll kill you.”...