HOME PAGES : TIMOTHY LAERY’S LONG GOODBYE

Timothy Leary is prepping for the afterlife. Naturally, it’s an alternative afterlife.

Diagnosed a year ago with untreatable prostate cancer, Leary isn’t interested in anything as mute as a gravestone or as passive as a memory--though he did consult the cryonics crowd about freezing his lysergic acid-soaked brain (the technology isn’t ready yet).

Instead, the psycotropic voyager is opting for an interactive memorial: a home page on the World Wide Web (an early version is accessible now) that’s a virtual simulacrum of his five-room Bel-Air house.

Visitors to the page knock on the front door with a click of the mouse. An image of Leary welcomes them inside, where they can tour his art collection, peruse Leary faves James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon in the library or rummage among his diaries and personal letters. Click on the Keith Haring painting above the living-room fireplace and the title and date of the work appear, along with a couple of Leary thoughts on the artist (“naughty boy, very playful”). Or click the CD player in the audiovisual room to hear tunes by musician friends Jimi Hendrix, David Byrne or Herbie Hancock.

“This is the first web site to take the approach of an immersive environment rather than a page of text,” says Leary, 75, approaching his last act as exuberantly as he embraced LSD, eastern mysticism and G. Gordon Liddy. . You can refer to it, add to it, change it. What I’m trying to do is personalize, humanize, individualize, popularize everything monopolized by IBM.”

Leary is also putting his voluminous archives online, working furiously to beat his cancer’s clock with cybernauts Christopher Graves and Joey Cavella of L.A.’s Retinalogic, who designed the home page and will maintain it after Leary dies. The site’s “Wall of Living Books” will offer published and unpublished Leary books and papers that readers are encouraged to annotate and rewrite. “When I’m dead, you can change anything,” says Leary. “The nice thing about it is that every person will get the Timothy Leary they deserve because every person is in control.” Adds Santa Monica screenwriter Michael Segal, a longtime friend: “I like the idea of being able to come visit after he’s gone.”

Leary wants the moment of his death to be cyber- participatory, too. His Bel-Air bedroom is becoming “The Goodbye Room,” equipped with a video camera connected to the Internet. “When I decide it’s time to go, mine will be the first visible, interactive suicide,” he says of the planned cybercast. “I hope to have 100,000 witnesses.”

For now, ‘netters can communicate directly with Leary in the chat room of his home page. Or maybe even after, depending on how powerful the modem is.

To visit Leary’s home page, knock at https://leary.com