For those who don't already think I'm crazy...

I realize that there’s nothing straight people like better than to listen to a druggie talk about how high he got, complete with details about all the stupid things he did, so I’m here to oblige.

I grew up in rural Mississippi during the ‘50s and ‘60s. This was before marijuana arrived and before teenagers realized that every cow pasture contained mushrooms that would make a person have visions. I occasionally heard tales about the ass-kicking power of Valium, Methadrine, Percodan, or Queludes, but I never knew anybody who had any, and there weren’t any drug dealers in my area, only bootleggers. All that my generation had to get wasted on was liquor, and, since Mississippi was still under Prohibition, liquor was abundant and any kid could buy it. I don’t know why the frequent teenage driving fatalities (I started driving while drunk as soon as I got my license at age 15) didn’t cause public alarm, but people seemed to assume that there was just something about teenagers that made them get drunk, flip cars, hit bridge abutments, and get runover by trains, and there was really nothing anyone could do to stop it. This was before MADD convinced the nation that drunk driving should be taken seriously, and during which drunkenness was portrayed as funny on prime time family television. 

In 1970, I was a senior in college, and I still hadn’t seen any marijuana. Then one night, my friend, Ed, and I were hitchhiking, and two girls from a school in Virginia picked us up. They had driven all the way to Mexico to buy pot, and were on their way home with several pounds. After they told us this, Ed whispered to me that we should rob them. I said no, so Ed spent the rest of the ride sulking. When we got out of the car, he was so mad that he threatened to push me off an I-20 overpass, so we continued our journey separately. These girls had given us a couple of joints to smoke later, but I don’t remember smoking them, although I’m sure I did. In any event, I smoked a lot of pot over the next twenty years, the quantity being limited by cost, availability, and the fact that I didn’t enjoy getting high everyday because doing that makes the drug work more like a downer than a hallucinogen. My assumption is that most potheads like the downer effect, but feeling sleepy and looking stupid never appealed to me. 

I knew that some shrinks and college professors from New York and California had become excited about the consciousness expanding effects of hallucinogenics, and claimed that such drugs gave them insights that led them to, “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.” Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (who became Ram Dass), and Alan Watts (an Episcopal priest) were the three I remember best. Then came Carlos Castaneda, an anthropologist who wrote a series of books about his apprenticeship with a Yaqui Indian medicine man who relied heavily upon a large number of hallucinogenics. I found it impossible to believe half of what Casteneda wrote, but I was impressed to think that even the remaining half might be true. In any event, Castaneda was one of the highly educated and respected people who believed in drugs so strongly that they jeopardized their careers by endorsing substances that, they believed, had the power to alter one’s consciousness for the better.

During this period, I was very distressed about the excruciatingly prolonged loss of my religious faith, and my hope was that drugs would give me a way of looking at life that was superior to what I had found thus far. I had heard that other people had seen God while on drugs, and I thought, well, why not me? Of course, I knew that some of these drugs could also induce lasting insanity. At the time, there was a famous daytime TV personality named Art Linkletter, whose twenty year old daughter Diane often appeared on his show. One day in 1969, Diane dropped acid and a few days later jumped from a skyscraper to her death. Art Linkletter, sweet and gentle man that he was, threatened to kill Timothy Leary because he blamed Leary for making drugs seem desirable to the kind of sensitive and searching people—like his daughter—who were the least equipped to handle them.

I personally witnessed two other incidents that made me take drugs seriously. I drove an ambulance at the time, and one night while I was in the ER, two hippies came in with a friend who was having such a bad trip that he didn’t know where he was. While the staff ignored him, two guards roughed him up for no reason that I could see other than that he was on drugs. After that, I realized that no matter how bad a trip might get, I would never go to a hospital for help. In the other incident, my best friend actually did see the Holy Spirit while on marijuana. Afterwards, he would look at me as if from the far side of the ocean and ask, “What’s it all about?” over and over and over. I was the one who finally drove him to a mental institution. He lost his job, his house, and his family, and never did regain his sanity.

In the interest of caution, I started taking half doses of whatever new drugs came my way and working up from there. After I experienced ten continuous hours of full scale visual hallucinations on marijuana while partying with people for whom I felt no rapport, I concluded that I needed to do more than simply start with half doses, so I resolved to go easy on drugs in the following situations: at night, at parties, in cold weather, in strange places, with people I didn’t trust, when I didn’t feel well, or late in the day (how hallucinogenics affect a person is closely tied to his or her surroundings), although I didn’t always stick to my resolve. I eventually experimented with psilocybin, meth, cocaine, LSD, hashish, ecstasy, angel dust, nitrous oxide, and a half dozen narcotics. I also mailed off for exotic drugs like lobelia and kava kava, drugs that the government hadn’t gotten around to outlawing, plus I ate morning glory seeds, smoked cloves, hops, and catnip, and experimented with other drugs that I no longer remember by name. 

I even took one drug that was so good that I wish I could feel that way forever. The drug was called ecstasy for good reason. Think of how you feel when your heart is overcome with sweetness for everything and everyone, and that’s what ecstasy is like several times over, or at least it was for me. The second time I had some, I shared it with a woman friend while visiting her and her husband. A half hour later, she became panicky, and her eyes started darting rapidly from side to side. I assumed she was having a seizure. Naturally, her husband was concerned, maybe the moreso because she was a nurse, and would lose her license if he took her to a hospital. Because I too was on ecstasy, I had every confidence that I could follow my friend into the depths of wherever the drug was taking her, and bring her right back out. And I did. First, I radiated love like the sun radiates light and warmth. Then, I held both of her hands in mine, looked into her darting eyes, and told her with complete certainty that she needn’t worry at all, because everything was going to be just fine. Because I believed this, she believed it too, and everything was just fine.  

Ecstasy is a very long-lasting drug, and the day after this incident, I was sitting on a city bus looking at passing cars when I noticed that their wheels were spinning backwards. In another hallucination (while on meth and marijuana), I heard the best music of my life coming from a toilet that had been flushed. I’ve also seen demons, heard angels, watched my face turn into the face of a turtle without knowing I was hallucinating, spent hours happily watching rapidly changing psychedelic patterns, felt intimately connected to angry red wasps, and watched trees dance. 

Two years ago, I got a marijuana card, and now I have a supply of marijuana that is far stronger than anything that was available in the old days. Twice, I’ve eaten too much (I “capture” the THC in butter and bake it into cookies). On the first of those occasions. I became extremely nauseous, could only move isolated muscles with sustained effort, and found that walking, crawling, or holding anything in my hands was impossible. On the second, I had visual and auditory hallucinations. No one gets that high on purpose—not more than once anyway—but it’s very hard to get a standardized dosage on cookies that are so strong that I limit myself to one-eighth of one small cookie and even that can sometimes be too much.

I’ve come so far in my ability to handle drugs, that hallucinations no longer scare me—not much anyway. What I’ve learned is that if a hallucination is troubling, I can turn my head away in order to either stop it or, if I’m lucky, find one that I enjoy. For example, the last scary one I had was when I looked at a wooden Santa, and saw it looking back at me with fiery eyes filled with hatred. There was a time when my eyes would have become stuck in his, but I immediately turned away, at which point I heard voices in the air above me, but they weren’t scary like Santa’s eyes, so I was sorry when they roared off into the distance.

Despite the risks, I don’t understand non-psychotic people who don’t experiment with drugs. I’ve known quite a few, but, “I’m not interested in drugs,” or, “I like myself the way I am,” only makes them seem, well, ignorant in that they have no way to know they’re uninterested in a given drug until they try it, drugs being so unlike other experiences and so unlike one another. As for liking oneself without drugs, the most interesting drugs (the hallucinogenics) don’t cause you to like yourself—they show you other ways of looking at reality. As the parlance goes, they take you on a trip, and you come back tired. As I see it, how could anyone NOT want to explore altered states of consciousness. To me, the desirability of it is so obvious that one doesn’t need a reason to justify doing it but rather to justify not doing it. You will grow from certain drugs if only because you experience heightened creativity and come to see “normal” reality as but one possibility and that, as desirable as “normal” is, other realities have a lot to recommend them.

Of course, I would agree that a person should evaluate the risk posed by a particular drug, and that some drugs really are so bad that one might reasonably choose to avoid them altogether. Meth, for instance. Bad stuff, meth (Just do a search for “meth before and after pictures”). But why avoid every psychoactive drug in the world because some of them are bad? I would also agree that a lot of drug users behave in ways that give drugs a bad name, yet I would offer in defense that a great many drug users are immature and troubled people who use them inappropriately. The fact that drugs will fuck you up doesn’t mean that this is all they will do (or even what they will do if you don’t overdose), but that’s all a lot of users get from them because that’s all they bring to them. The only drug that I have regrets about is alcohol, and it’s the only one that’s legal.

The Doors’ drug-inspired music captured a taste of what hallucinogenics sometimes feel like. Along with people like Leary, they and other bands inspired much of the drug use of the era.

"Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced." Keats

I was in the kitchen last night when I was suddenly so overcome by the fear of death that I couldn't have felt much worse had I been on the threshold of being violently murdered. I forgot that I ever felt any differently, and I wondered why I hadn't long since killed myself simply to escape my terror of dying. I recalled that before Hemingway blew his head off with a shotgun, he had tried to throw himself into an airplane propeller, and I imagined that I was experiencing a taste of that same desperation. 

A few minutes later, I put on a Czechoslovakian film called The Cremator, which turned out to be the darkest, scariest movie I had ever seen, and the fact that it was also brilliantly funny only made the horror worse. Indeed, I had to steel myself to remain in my chair. Then, I remembered that I had eaten some marijuana an hour before the fear started, and I realized that my emotion had been drug-inspired and wasn't really the totality of my life. Marijuana exacts a price for its insights, and if I use it when I'm already upset, as I did last night, the result can be such that I wouldn't hesitate to call it insanity. I survive such times simply by riding them out. I was afterwards exhausted but couldn't sleep so I took an Ambien. It is now the next afternoon, and I've been weak, dizzy, and anxious, all day. I just took a large dose of marijuana because I want to see where it will take me when I am already in such a state. 

You probably read that last sentence in horror and with the question Why?! in your mind. My answer is that I am on a quest in the realm of ultimate reality, and marijuana untethers my consciousness so that I can free associate a hundred times more effectively than usual, and the result of this free association is oftentimes new insights. As you might imagine, given that I'm an atheist, I hesitate to use the word quest because many are sure to assume that such adventured are spiritually inspired and, if successful, will lead to God. My conclusion has been just the opposite. 

Why is this, do you think?

People usually undertake spiritual quests with a pretty good idea of what they're going to experience, and this determines what they do experience. I came at my quest from the opposite direction, that is I started with faith and lost it. That's the thing about spiritual quests, once you give up your preconceptions regarding the nature of ultimate reality, you don't know where you're going to exit the rabbit hole. I know where I exited, and it is here that I will make my stand unless something unexpected happens. What I mean by this is that I try to be open to what many of you call spiritual realities, but the only reason I see to think they exist is that so many people believe in them. 

Why doesn't the firm belief of millions of people over thousands of years lead you too to believe? 

I suspect that people believe for two reasons, neither of which has anything to do with external reality. The first is that they are raised to believe as they do, and the second is that they are probably, to some extent, evolutionarily programmed to believe in a spiritual realm.

But, if your conclusion is that the spiritual realm is imaginary, why are you still on a quest? 

The fact that spirits don't exist doesn't make reality less profound or the search for the best ways to live and think less meaningful. In fact, I think the opposite could be true, and here is why. For those who believe in a wise, powerful, and benevolent spiritual realm, the goal is to live in consistency with the desires of that realm just as a child lives in consistency with the desires of its parents. This usually results in a high degree of conformity among those who put their trust in a particular book or teacher. By contrast, I am alone in the darkness with no one to guide me. I say that I am alone because it truly is my road to travel, and the fact that others have traveled it hasn't proven to be of much benefit to me. I can only have confidence in that which I experience because it is only experience that seems real, although I can never be sure that it is real. I just know that it's the only light that I have to go by. As I live it, atheism is stark and bleak, but it is hardly shallow. However dismal the lessons, the quest itself is its own reward.

The point is to get woke-up, not fucked-up

I’ve written several times about the effects of marijuana, but for each piece that I posted, there were five that I didn’t because I know that many of you have little patience for the subject. This means that when I do write, I need to make it good, yet there’s nothing harder to convey than an experience that is completely alien to others, especially when they might judge it harshly, as is often the case with my posts about drugs and atheism. 

As you go through an ordinary day, how many new thoughts or insights do you have? I have few to none when I’m straight, but I’m awash in them when I’m high. I become so adrift within myself that I never know what new shore I’m going to land upon. I find myself visiting several per hour, and the rapid-fire intensity of my visions leaves me exhausted.

One person speculated—probably whimsically—that pot might lead me to God. I actually do have experiences that are akin to mysticism, and I enjoy them, but because I don’t believe in spirits, I don't interpret them spiritually. I’m open to seeing God, but so far I’ve only seen a succession of demons. That was 30 years ago, and I didn't believe they were real even as I was looking at them, although they still scared the hell out of me (ha). More recently, I all but see music, and I do sometimes see my surroundings pulse and shimmer. Often the drug starts by enveloping me within a heavy cloak of fear and anguish, which usually gives way to such an absorption in my thoughts that I completely lose contact with the external world. To better convey the profundity of the drug, I'm going to share what a friend wrote about her experience as she was nearing the end of a bad marriage.

“I was really losing it because I didn’t know what came next; I only knew I was, by necessity, going to be losing everything and walking away from it all. My son offered me some weed…. I smoked my first bowl in 30 years…and suddenly my life looked completely different. Suddenly, I could see inside. I understood. I am not talking about the delusions we consider that seem profound at the time, but that in reality are just that—delusions. These were very real revelations about myself, and along with those revelations came the emotions, the insights, the tears, the rants, the guilt, the anxiety, and finally and essentially…the very real ME I had been keeping hidden away for years….”

Unfortunately, marijuana increases right-brain depth and self-honesty at the expense of left-brain learning, memory, and problem solving, so I mostly use it when my left brain isn't too busy. I also need to be able to stop whatever else I'm doing to write because writing becomes my obsession when I'm high. Unfortunately, very little of what I put down is ever read by anyone, including myself, and this leaves me feeling more lonely and discouraged than I might otherwise feel, but it can't be helped. As Schopenhauer wrote:

“There is some wisdom in taking a gloomy view, in looking upon the world as a kind of Hell, and in confining one's efforts to securing a little room that shall not be exposed to the fire.”

In my fantasy, all of you are here with me, and we're high. Only what do we do next--go to our separate computers and blog? Well, why the hell not? I would argue that in most cases, writing is superior to speaking, if only because it gives a person time to reflect and, hopefully, to go deeper.

About the photo. The film canister contains unground flower buds (the most desirable part of the plant); the jar contains ground flower buds that are ready to smoke; and the silver thingy is a grinder. The open-top container holds matches. The pipe was made decades ago by a friend and is about as basic as it gets, but I don't smoke a lot. I mostly simmer marijuana in butter (the odor is so strong that it spills into the yard even with the windows closed) and then use the butter to make small sugar cookies that I cut into quarters, one quarter of a cookie being as much as I would ever want. Two quarters are pictured.

A second experiment with posting in the moment

Given how much I bitch and whine, Peggy might not realize that I try to spare her from the worst of what I feel, but I can’t do it today. I had a horrendous night last night that followed a day spent trying to recover from another bad night. Dilaudid didn’t help, so I lay awake for hours and I am just about through the roof right now. I smoked some pot an hour ago hoping it would help, but unlike yesterday, I’m experiencing something similar to a bad acid trip. I feel like I’m caught in a nightmare, and I don’t have the strength to find peace in the storm. I work everyday to stay calm and hopeful, but when I’m really hurting, really exhausted, and really without any means to control the pain without knocking myself out, I just can’t find it in me. I’m unfit for anything but to shake and cry, yet, there’s something here for me. I know it, but I can't find it even after years of looking.... I've heard enough Mary Wells and going to listen to some Goulet. Before marijuana, I didn't care about music. Now, it's one of my main comforts, it and plants.

An experiment in not editing—much anyway

I’ve been thinking about posting more and editing less because it’s making me crazy that I can’t stop editing. Even after I post something, I continue editing for days. So, here goes.

It’s a good day to live in Eugene (the photo is one that I took of some area scenery). The six months of drizzle are at an end, and the drought hasn’t arrived. It’s our second 80-degree day (27 C), 80 being 15 degrees above my ideal, but still pleasant enough.

I did yard work yesterday and suffered a lot for it last night. In fact, I’m such a wreck today that I’m avoiding unnecessary chores. I had intended to at least march in a pro-marijuana parade, but my knees were hurting too bad. I did bike to the library and got some books about war (I just finished—and can recommend—American Sniper, The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History). I also bought some eucalyptus incense—which I’m now enjoying—and biked around the downtown area looking at the freaks. I like freaks—if they’re pleasant freaks. I also enjoy homeless men. Years ago, I considered them disgusting, so one day I passed a panhandler without speaking to him although he said something to me. He got up and followed me, demanding in a loud voice that I at least show him the respect of acknowledging his existence. I walked on in silence. I now shed tears when I remember that man. I could have done good, and I chose evil.

My right shoulder is hurting me a lot today, but I do my damnedest to avoid drugs in the daytime with the exception of marijuana, and I’m already so strung-out from the drugs that I took last night that I don’t dare use that. I literally feel like I’m losing my mind, and marijuana could make it worse. I’m also so tired that I'm sick, and marijuana could make that worse too. Then again, it could make me hyper. It's not a predictable drug, at least in my case.

Kurt and Jackie are coming for supper. Their cat was killed the day before yesterday, and although we rarely see them more than a few times a year, I thought it good to invite them to supper for the second week in a row. They accepted with an enthusiasm that made me sad for them.

I have two other recommendations for you. The first is an interview entitled A Portrait of Maurice Sendak. It's the heaviest thing I've ever seen on film, yet it's only 39 minutes long. He died a few days after I watched it, and I've seen it a few more times since then. My last recommendation is Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: a Neuroscientist Examines His Former Life on Drugs. The author reminded me a friend from 30 years ago named Larry. One day Larry and were smoking pot with another man when the other man handed Larry a handful of pills and asked if Larry knew what any of them were. Larry had no idea, but he swallowed them down without even asking. After that, I thought of him as a starving dog.


So, I took a hit, and I'm happy to report that I feel a little better. The pain is still with me, but it doesn't hurt like it did.

Things I love everyday that I live

I love Peggy. On the wall over my monitor is something she wrote on yellow scrap paper 20 years ago, which is but half as long as we've been married. It’s as true for how I see her as for how she sees me.

“I love Lowell 100 million billion trillion times over. I love him sooooooooooooo much. He is the best man, and I love him.
Peggy
Love Love Love Love Love”

I love plants. I feel more life emanating from plants than from people. My delusion probably comes from the fact that plants are fully here and fully now. They are blessedly free from even as the possibility of deception. Rocks are also our superiors in that regard. So it is with nearly every being that our species looks down upon (which is to say every being but ourselves). If Peggy loved them too, I would fill the house with plants. I’m especially drawn to potted plants during the winter when most outdoor plants are homely, and when it’s too wet and cold to enjoy sitting on the ground. It’s as if I inhale their essence when I’m among plants and, unlike mine, their essence is pure.

I love to dig holes. I love the beauty of the tools; the changing colors and textures of the earth; the feel of the work inside my body; the odors and the coolness; my unusual vantage point of the world; the occasional pebble, fossil, earthworm, or human artifact; and the knowledge that I might unearth a treasure of one kind or another. When I lie in bed at night and fantasize that my pain is gone, the first thing I want to do is to dig a hole.

I love habanero peppers, which are the hottest peppers I can find (sixty times hotter than jalapenos). They’re so hot that they make the top of my head sweat, and my hands hurt all night and into the next day if I don’t wear gloves while cutting them. I started eating habaneros years ago as a treatment for Raynaud’s Disease, overcame the agony of the heat enough to enjoy the high—they go especially well with marijuana—and found that they helped the Raynaud’s so much that I’m rarely bothered by it.

I love caps. Hats look better, but they don’t shade the eyes as well; you can’t pull a hood over them; most of them can’t take rough handling; they’re a nuisance when it’s windy; and, last but not least, the brim hits the headrests in cars. The only thing caps don’t do well is to keep rain from running down my neck, but it only rains here in the winter, so I just raise my hood over my cap, and the cap keeps it from coming down over my eyes.

I love rocks for their beauty, their stories, and their antiquity. Even here in the geologically young Willamette Valley, it’s possible to find rocks that go back 40-million years. These youngsters are 400,000 times older than a 100-year-old person. I study the strata in cliff faces; I dig charred wood from pyroclastic flows; I pry globe-like concretions from roadcuts; I try to feel the story of the fossils that lie buried in my backyard. Sometimes, I even sleep with rocks because—in my imagination anyway—they emanate a force. I had once hoped that force would heal me, but it couldn’t, although, as with plants, rocks can bring the joy and comfort that allows me to live despite the pain.

I love shopping at Goodwill. Half of me goes nuts over secondhand bric-a-brac, but the other half hates a cluttered house, so it’s an anguished love, but an inextinguishable love nonetheless. Besides, everything is so cheap that I figure I can always buy something to replace something I already have, and then pass on what I replaced. I can also buy things for other people, enabling me to enjoy Goodwill while dumping the curse of clutter onto them, but also giving them something that I love, that I hope they will love, and that I purchased with thought and affection.

I love my room—see photo. The walls are pink, and I have lots of plants, though not so many as I want.

I love marijuana. One-fourth of a small sugar cookie, and my world is born anew. Music and language swim in the periphery of my vision; colors assume such depth that I become disoriented. I feel thoughts well up as if from depths unimagined. I am overcome by the knowledge that trees, dogs, cats, potted plants—all the things I love—have an immediacy and an intensity that is beyond expression. I become so enamored of the history and creativity behind the fifty-year-old kitsch at Goodwill that I want to buy it all in honor of the people who made it and loved it all those years ago. I become more patient and tolerant; I see my worries from a realistic perspective, and they’re always less scary than I imagined.

I love writing. I live through the written word just as a photographer lives through a viewfinder. This makes it very hard for me to be close to anyone who really and truly has no interest in what I write because what I write is the deepest part of me, at least the deepest part of me that I can touch.

I love reading because it teaches me things and it allows me to visit other people’s worlds. I read about plants, geology, and home repair. I also like biographies, Westerns and books of cartoons—especially Gary Larson. My taste in biography tends to run to people who were hated like Benedict Arnold or Bonnie and Clyde. My only problem with reading is that I never seem to do it as much as I would like.

You might think that I’ve expressed a few surprising thoughts for an atheist, yet I couldn’t love these things nearly so much if I believed—like many do—that they are flawed forms of a once perfect reality. If I have a religion, it lies in nature because nature is all there is, and we’re each a part of it, and therefore a part of one another, and of everything else too.

The effect of marijuana on my writing

It stimulates thoughts and feelings that I wouldn’t otherwise have, and takes me deeper into myself than I could otherwise go. It makes the commonplace profound, and the profound intense. It also takes me to the edge of panic. Sometimes, it makes my hands shake and my fingers tremble across the keyboard. I sweat and shiver at once; sometimes, I cry. My monitor recedes into another dimension. I have left the outside world for an encounter with my essence.

Marijuana is changing me. It’s too strong, and I use it too much for this to be otherwise. My belief is that I’m becoming more at peace and that I’m going deeper with my writing, but drugs are notorious for their deceptiveness, and their effects are rarely permanent. It’s also true that I’ve known few, if any, people who became wiser or more insightful for using marijuana. However, the same can be said about the influence of art, music, nature, literature, heroism, and other laudatory influences. No good thing can propel a person beyond his potential.

When my mother died

My mother would become infuriated when I smoked marijuana, so I did it in front of her every chance I got. I was that way about everything that infuriated my mother. My sister was the opposite. She too did all kinds of things that seriously displeased our mother (our father didn’t care what we did), but she would lie her way out of them whenever she could.

When my mother died—in 1988—they brought the body to the house, and I sat beside her, smoking pot, in a one-person wake. I didn’t think I could bear letting her go, so I hoped I could rise to some plane where she still existed, or at least hallucinate her, but the closest I got was when I heard her gasp for air. At that moment, I thought I had done it. I thought she was going to open her eyes and talk to me, but she just lay there, not really looking much like herself.

1/3 of 1 oz

The nasty looking stuff in the bottle is 190 proof ethyl alcohol in which marijuana leaves steeped for three months. You’re probably thinking, “Hell, son, I could drink a quart of that and race at Talladega,” to which I would respond, “Great! I look forward to seeing you do it, because I find that one third of one ounce propels me into a strong but mellow high that just keeps taking me up and up and up for hours until it dumps me back on earth sickly and depressed. I would even go so far as to say that if any drink ever deserved to be called The Devil’s Brew, this is it, not because it tastes horrible (which it does), but because of its strength per molecule. After a few drops of this stuff, your world will glow, pulse, undulate, radiate, and even transmogrify into a magnificent state like that of a vivid dream of a land in which strange beings dwell.

There are advantages to seeing in oneself the proximity of schizophrenia without actually being schizophrenic, except when on drugs. There is truly a gift here, but there is also the threat of nightmare. If I were unable to return to a normal life, I don’t know how I could bear it, yet I don’t want to rush back from a world that exists so deeply within that I hardly recognize it as being a part of me.

Hopalong and me

Now that Peggy’s gone. I get up between 10:00 and 11:00, eat oats or Grape Nuts for breakfast, work all day while I listen to Western audiobooks, watch a Western movie at night as I eat sardines and tidy-up, down 8mgs of Dilaudid, take a hit of bud (despite what my pain specialist says, pot and Dilaudid makes for one hell of a delightful combination), and read a Western novel until the words start floating off into space—this doesn’t take long. Then I lie in a warm glow until sleep overtakes me within anywhere from two minutes to two hours depending upon whether the drugs keep me so entertained that I can’t sleep. It’s a good life, this working everyday and getting loaded every night, although I do hate being repeatedly awakened by the pain.

Taking on what is to me a hard physical project makes me feel like a man again. Only people who have been there can understand the extent to which pain and disability can take away a person’s pride, especially if his entire adult life was devoted to physical hobbies and occupations. I’m happier than I’ve been in years because I know that if I can survive this job, I can survive other jobs too. It’s just a matter of keeping a good supply of drugs. I had rather die than to go back to being unable to work.

I wrote most of the following paragraphs in the comment section, but am going to add them as an appendum.

It’s not that I have suddenly decided to take on hard projects despite the pain, but that I have improved enough that, with narcotics, I can now bear what pain there is when I take on what is for me a hard project--this project being my test of that. There was a time when movement hurt so much that I had to grasp my shoulders with my hands in order to walk, and I couldn’t even dust furniture for the pain. For an entire year, not a night went by that I didn't sleep in a recliner while taking narcotics every few hours and using ice packs continually, and I would still hurt too bad to sleep for more than brief periods. If I were in such pain now, I would be screaming in agony were I been silly enough to attempt my current project. It would be like fire to my body.



I don’t know what to attribute this recent improvement to. I went back to physical therapy with yet another new therapist a month ago, and he is the first therapist who has been able to devise exercises that I can bear. I’m also taking Sam-E and Cymbalta, so maybe all three of these things or none of these things are responsible for my improvement.

Although I long since stopped trusting that good times will last, these last few weeks have been the best period I’ve had since the pain got really bad four years ago, so it is tempting to be hopeful. However, both the pain specialist I saw last week and my physical therapist have told me that I will always be in pain (the longer a person is in pain, the less chance there is that he will recover). In fact, the therapist asked me whether I'm more interested in building strength or in reducing pain, and I told him unhesitatingly that I value strength above reduced pain. Being strong helps me to want to live. Some people seem able to slide into invalidism with little angst, but I can’t imagine ever reconciling myself to such a life.

I take great comfort in knowing that, whatever is causing my pain, at least it can’t be as bad as syringomyelia or chronic regional pain disorder, two of the diagnoses I’ve had that turned out to be wrong.


The painting is by Frank Earle Schooner (1877-1972), and is entitled “Hopalong Takes Command.” It's owned by the Delaware Art Museum

The saying goes, “The most personal is the most universal,” but maybe that’s not true if you’re insane.

My atheist group had a picnic in the country today. I had said I was going, but changed my mind a few hours before it started because I’m always ambivalent about events that include more than ten people. Then someone offered me a ride, so I went after all.

My relationship with groups is ever fraught with angst, but this group more than most because I went from being its de facto leader to only attending an occasional meeting, a change that didn’t occur because I was a happy camper. Yet, I attend no other group; I know most of the people in this one; and I do retain some semblance of status and familiarity. I got the feeling today that I could step back into a leadership role, and people would welcome me, and that was good to know, but, then again, maybe they were just being polite. Part of why I’m so tormented about groups is that I have no faith in my perceptions. Other people seem as alien to me as if they were from another planet, which is one reason that my blog is so important. Here, I can share feelings that I share nowhere else, not even with Peggy (although she reads my blog).

After my nightmarish marijuana overdose last weekend, I’ve been having problems handling even one hit of the drug, so what to I do just before the picnic, but eat a half teaspoon of leftover marijuana butter so that I could clean the container. Maybe that wasn’t a good idea; I don’t know. All I know is that as the picnic went on, I became way too high, so in order to mellow out, I drank wine, but that just left me drunk and high. I kept using use the wrong words for what I meant to say, or else screwing-up the pronunciation of the right words. Oddly enough, one of the other men had suffered a stroke, and he was doing the same thing.

Now, I’m home and still way too wired. I feel stupid when I don’t see these things coming, but in my defense, I ate 3½ tsp of marijuana butter last week when things got so bad, so I had no idea that a mere half tsp would hit me this hard. And maybe it didn’t. Maybe I’m just fucking insane. I couldn’t even screw up the courage to open my mouth at the last meeting of this group (on Wednesday), and there I was today unable to close it. At least I didn’t rattle on about myself—I don’t think I did anyway—because I was much more interested in what other people had to say. I drew them out as best I could, and when one woman mentioned that something I had written made her think I didn’t want her in the group anymore, I instantly burst into tears for having pained her so.

Later, I almost cried a second time, although I don’t remember why. I was almost unbearably present emotionally, and unless I’m in a group where such behavior is expected (and I’ve been in many such groups), that’s frightening. It was where I had to be though. Someone would say something, and I would ask them a personal question about their feelings about what they had said—the kind of questions that most people wouldn’t dare to ask. That’s always risky, but if I can do it well, it makes for a more interesting dialogue. My guess is that I do it pretty well, but again, I don’t trust my perceptions about much of anything that has to do with other people... Right now, I wish I could chill-out because I am still feeling way too intense (imagine having the caffeine from twenty cups of coffee injected into your vein while at the same time you’re shooting skyward in an incredibly fast elevator). I can barely type because I’m trembling so.

Okay okay, I admit it. I knew what could happen when I ate that pot, and I did it anyway. Pot can make me feel positively insane, and that’s one reason I like it. It’s also why I’m especially prone to do it in a social situation that—given how insecure I am—makes me feel insane anyway. Why yes, this does make me sound like I enjoy bashing my head against a wall. On one level, it’s stupid, but then so are ultra-marathons and base-jumping. Hundreds of things seem stupid to people who don’t understand them. Of course, with pot, the risk isn’t to my body but to my sanity—at least it feels that way sometimes because, after last weekend especially, it’s as if pot has burned a conduit from my brain straight down to hell. Maybe you’re understanding me, or maybe you’re appalled. Peggy is appalled. She’s 100% for medical marijuana as long as it’s for a medical purpose, but I’m often tempted to use it at other times too—like before going to a social gathering at which everyone else is apt to be straight. It’s as if I looked at what might prove to be the worst thing I could do, and I did it. Can you relate to what I’m saying?

Teachable Moments

Continuing right along with my medical marijuana experimentation, I made some ganja butter by simmering leaves in butter overnight in a crock-pot. I had no idea how strong it would be, so I started with ¼ tsp straight-up—instead of in a recipe—and, when I felt nothing, I took ½ tsp three hours later. When I still felt nothing, I concluded that ganja butter must be as woosie as the tincture I had made. I decided that I was going to get some effect from it or die trying, so I started in again at noon the next day with ¾ tsp, and by midnight was up to 1½ tsp. I still had nothing to report when I went to bed at 2:00. At 2:50, I felt as if I had been catapulted into the air and was floating above the bed. “Uh oh,” I thought, “any trip that starts out this intense is going to be a bear."

I resolved, no matter what, not to awaken Peggy (who has her own room) because she had a migraine when she went to bed, and because she has a hard time dealing with anything that approximates mental illness. If I had been less experienced with marijuana, I would have panicked, but as it was, I mostly felt poisoned. I was so sick in body and spirit that I figured a hard death couldn’t be much worse, and then I became scared that I might have to go through the same thing all over again when I die. My heart was racing, sweat was pouring off me, and breathing and swallowing felt increasingly awkward. As I lay there watching the high wash over me in waves, I thought to distract myself by thinking about things I had to do, but, to my horror, it took me awhile to remember the basic facts of my life, things like who I was, where I lived, and the floor plan of my house. Yet, I could easily remember things that were bothering me. For instance, I recalled that three weeks have passed since I last visited a friend who is dying of cancer, and I brooded about the large dead tree that is threatening to fall upon my house, the one that my neighbor doesn’t want to cut. I also thought about a dinner invitation for the coming night that I felt sure I was going to have to cancel by humiliating myself with the truth about what I had done.

I thought I might feel better if I got out of bed, so I made my way unsteadily to the bathroom, where it occurred to me that I had better hurry back to bed while I still could. I took an Ambien on the way because I hoped it would help me sleep through the worst of the trip. I wondered if I should call someone for support, but I didn’t know a single soul whom I felt—at that moment—that I could awaken with such a problem, this despite the fact that I would feel honored to receive such a call. Besides, I doubted my ability to form words even if I were able to look up a number and dial a phone. I then thought about getting support by writing a blogpost and publishing it immediately, but I realized that I was too far-gone to write coherently. I could just see all of you finding a post that contained ten pages of, “3x4r-0u@vmpIO!UJ_jo7gn….”

I consoled myself with the thought that, as bad as things were, at least I wasn’t throwing up like I would be if I were really drunk. At that moment I realized that I was about to be at least as sick as I had ever been on alcohol. I tried to race off to the bathroom, but I couldn’t make my hands or feet work, so I rolled out of bed and puked on the floor. So much for not waking Peggy.

She was soon kneeling beside me, her frightened voice asking what I had taken and if I had fallen out of bed, but I was too far gone to speak (she figured out for herself what had happened). She brought me a trashcan, so as I lay in puke, I puked into it, so weak and uncoordinated that I couldn’t find my face with a washcloth or blow my nose with a Kleenex. I was drenched with sweat, so Peggy brought a fan, and we sat on the floor together hoping I could eventually get back into bed. With her help, I finally made it, but it was a difficult journey. In bed, I continued to puke as Peggy held the trashcan. When I at last appeared to be settling down, she said that her migraine was so bad that she simply had to go back to bed, but she didn’t reach the door before I was puking again.

Except for feeling weak and having a sore throat, I was better than fine the next day, so I did two things soon after I got out of bed. The first was to call my dying friend and arrange a visit. The second was to talk to my neighbor again about the tree. Both of these conversations went well, and I passed the day in a glow because of them and because I felt so proud of myself for having survived the night. Aside from people who end up in mental institutions, I had literally experienced the worst marijuana trip that I had ever heard of. I had survived it largely by reminding myself that I’m a mature person who has survived other bad trips, and so I would surely survive this one too.

You might find this incomprehensible, but I wouldn’t go back and do anything differently. Along with the pride I take in having held myself together psychologically, there is also—and I’m ashamed to admit this—something about the experience that draws me. I mean, have YOU ever had such a trip? Probably not, and you probably wouldn’t want to either, but given all the horror stories I’ve heard about ganja butter, I can see in retrospect that I invited it.

What I was seeking during those years when I took every hallucinogen that I could lay my hands on was an encounter with ultimate reality—at least inasmuch as it exists within myself as an integral part of the universe—because things look pretty bleak from my perspective. Take our species. We like to think we’re special, but the way I look at it, one—or even all—of us is of no more intrinsic value than a glob of snot, and the same could be said of our entire galaxy. That’s hard to accept, yet the evidence supports no other conclusion.

So, having no book, no god, no guru, or anyone else who I think has a clue more than I do about ultimate reality, there is no help for it but for me to turn within. Do I see much there? No, and if I had found drugs of any great benefit, I wouldn’t have given them up. Yet, they do offer something that I haven’t found elsewhere; they enable me to see myself more deeply than normal and from more angles than normal. On the one hand, marijuana, for example, goes a long way toward annihilating my left-brain intelligence (which is why math, language, spatial relationships, my sense of time and speed, and my planning and organizing ability wanes dramatically), but it also makes my right brain explode. Thoughts and associations come and go at lightning speed, and the power of some emotions is quadrupled while other emotions seem downright alien. I don’t say that there’s much in the way of concrete learning to be gained from drugs, but not all learning is concrete.

I just paused to think, and my eyes went to a paint-by-number piece (see photo) that was in my house when I was born. Maybe you have something from your childhood that has given you pure joy for all these many years. If so, you’ll know how much I love this painting, and you’ll probably agree with me that such objects bring us lessons that we can’t put into words. Likewise, you surely understand that when Peggy was holding that trashcan in the darkness despite the noise, the stench, and the fact that she had a migraine, she was teaching me something, not just about love, but about romance. One night like that tells me more about her and her love for me than all the Valentine’s cards in the world, but such knowledge can’t be put into words.

Peggy and I were walking Bonnie today when we passed another couple who, upon our approach, made their half-grown dog sit. “We’re having a teachable moment,” the woman explained. That about sums up life, I thought. We’ll soon lose all this learning that each of us has gained over a lifetime, and the universe will go on as if we never existed, but while we’re here, what else is there for us but to sit at the feet of the universe as reverently as that dog sat before its Mom and Dad, and to see what it is that we might lay up as knowledge that will carry us to—and through—the moment that we die?

Things just keep getting stranger and stranger

Russell—my habitually jobless brother-in-law—lived by the motto: “Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope.” If Russell was out of marijuana, he would drive as far as it took and spend as much as necessary to get some, and he would smoke it all day everyday until he ran out. Then he divorced my sister, married a woman with three children who vehemently opposed drugs, and took a sixty-hour job at an egg factory (picture a filthy, smelly, ear-shattering, disease ridden, standing-room-only hell for a million defenseless creatures, and that’s an egg factory). Go figure.

I never wanted to smoke dope all day long, but I’ve been high to some extent for weeks now, and I can’t say that I oppose staying that way. Pot lessens my pain, lightens my mood, helps me sleep, decreases my stress, renews my sense of wonder, heightens my appreciation of music, helps me get along better with Peggy, makes me tolerant of—and interested in—other people, and enables me to be more honest yet more tactful. On the downside, it shreds my memory, makes me accident-prone, messes with my coordination, decreases my ability to judge time and speed, and probably has long-term consequences that I don’t even know about. This leads me to ask which are more important to me, the good things that pot gives or the good things that pot takes away. Right now, my vote is with number one. Sometimes, you don’t know how bad things have been until they get a little better, and pot has made things a great deal better. Fuck having brains; I just want to feel good.

As I see it, pot is different from narcotics, anti-depressants, and sleeping pills (all of which I’ve relied on heavily at one time or another) primarily in that it does a better job with less risk. I’ve taken a lot of powerful drugs, but they all scared me so much that I never had the balls to take as many as I actually needed, and my fear increased dramatically as I built up a tolerance to every one of them. One virtue of pot is that you’re not going to wake up with yellow eyes or failed kidneys, and I would sacrifice quite a few brains cells to avoid either of those. Brains are good, obviously, but you have to ask yourself after a certain point how many are strictly necessary. Of course, I’m assuming here that marijuana-related memory loss is long-term, and I don’t know that to be true… Now what was I saying?

The photo is of a psychedelic frogfish and was made by David Hall at seaphotos.com

The wisdom of Satan

As a child, I couldn’t imagine that anything existed apart from my presence, and this resulted in the happy thought that the entire universe was but a product of my imagination. Only later did there settle upon me the horrifying realization that this could only mean that I was completely and inexorably alone. The following conversation from Mark Twain’s novelette, The Mysterious Stranger echoes my imagining, if it was an imagining. When I’m smoking marijuana, it almost seems that I was right the first time (this feeling of being lost and alone within an unknowable universe is the thing that most frightens me about pot, and that makes pot irresistible to me). The speakers are a 15th century boy named Theodor and his friend, the angel Satan—a character who is surely a hundred times more interesting than any of the gods. I am so moved by this passage that I sometimes howl when I read it (or is that too unbalanced to admit?) It starts with Satan speaking.

“…I must go now, and we shall not see each other any more."

“In this life, Satan, but in another? We shall meet in another, surely?”

Then, all tranquilly and soberly, he made the strange answer, “There is no other.”

A subtle influence blew upon my spirit from his, bringing with it a vague, dim, but blessed and hopeful feeling that the incredible words might be true - even must be true.

“Have you never suspected this, Theodor?”

“No. How could I? But if it can only be true –”

“It is true.”

A gust of thankfulness rose in my breast, but a doubt checked it before it could issue in words, and I said, “But - but - we have seen that future life - seen it in its actuality, and so –”

“It was a vision - it had no existence.”

I could hardly breathe for the great hope that was struggling in me. “A vision? - a vi –”

“Life itself is only a vision, a dream.”

It was electrical. By God! I had had that very thought a thousand times in my musings!

“Nothing exists; all is a dream. God - man - the world - the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars - a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space - and you!”

“I!”

“And you are not you - you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. I myself have no existence; I am but a dream - your dream, creature of your imagination. In a moment you will have realized this, then you will banish me from your visions and I shall dissolve into the nothingness out of which you made me . . .

“I am perishing already - I am failing - I am passing away. In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever - for you will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams, and better!

“Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago - centuries, ages, eons, ago! - for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities.

"Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane - like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell - mouths mercy and invented hell - mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him! . . .

“You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks - in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.

“It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream - a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought - a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"

He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true.

“If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” Nietzsche

For decades, I’ve written my way through depressive periods, but this last one was too deep. The more I despair of ever being free from crippling pain, the harder life becomes, so when something else upsets me—and something about the group I lead did upset me—I sink to a place that is cold and dark and from which words cannot escape.

Peggy and I took an overnight trip last week, and, as sometimes happens, I threw out all the stops in order to get enough pain relief to enjoy myself, but when I couldn’t feel 20 mgs of oxycodone (2-4 times the normal starting dose), I gave up. Same thing yesterday when we had an overnight guest. I took my strongest sleeping pill (Dalmane), but it only worked for ninety minutes before I had to consider what to take next. So it is that I can no longer quiet the pain without taking high doses of so many different kinds of pills that I fear for my safety. I’m going to look into getting some marijuana because it’s all that I know to do. At least pot won’t kill you.

I haven’t smoked marijuana in fifteen years. The last time was at a large party, which is the last place I should smoke dope, but, what the hell, it was good shit, and it was free. When the social terror kicked in, I went outside and sat in a car with a woman, and things were good until she got cold and went back in. I soon became cold too, but I couldn’t face all those people, so I drove home. It wasn’t a long way, but it seemed like a long way because my sense of time and speed were so warped that I had to stare at the speedometer the whole way. Things stayed bad for me once I got home, but at least I was alone.

Around midnight, I went back to the party, and that was good because the pounding music and deafening chatter were gone, and enough people had left that things were mellow. I couldn’t find Peggy, and no one remembered having seen her for hours. I figured she would turn up eventually, so I settled into the conversation until around 2:00 when someone finally found her asleep on a bed upon which people had thrown their coats. Never a woman to hold her liquour, she had gotten sleepy after two drinks, burrowed to the bottom of the coat pile, and missed most of the party.

In 1980, I had my worst—and my best—experience with marijuana at another party. What made it so bad was that I had no place to get away to because I was a hundred miles from home in the Louisiana Delta—near Tallulah. Another problem was that there were only twelve people at the party, so I would have needed to explain my departure, but I couldn’t very well have done that because I had lost the ability to make words come out when I opened my mouth. Imagine an animal that rolls itself into a ball when it’s afraid, and imagine that this animal doesn’t know when to stop, so the ball keeps getting tighter and tighter until the animal’s every thought and every function are drawn into a psychic black hole. That’s how marijuana makes me feel sometimes.

It was nightime, and we were on a screened-in porch sitting around an empty cable spool that had been turned into a table. My mother was there and she was drunk, but she never smoked marijuana. Joints and water pipes were being passed around so fast that I hardly had time to exhale from one before someone handed me another. I knew that things were about to get really bad for me, but I didn’t do drugs for fun but because I wanted to explore every corner of my being. When I was with a group of people or with people I didn’t trust, the result was very bad, but when I was alone—or with one other person whom I did trust—it was very good.

There were citronella candles on the spool, and I was staring at a raised area on the one nearest me when it morphed into the face of a monster. The monster stared at me—and me at it—until it suddenly leaped from the candle into my face. I jumped, and then I turned the candle around to make the monster go away, but another monster took its place. I turned the candle again and again, but a different monster appeared each time, and it never occurred to me to stop looking at them. Then I realized that everyone had stopped talking. When I looked up, eleven smug monsters with lying smiles on their evil faces were staring at me.

With a Marlboro held high in one hand and a Miller High Life in the other, my monster mother drawled in her best drunk Southerner accent, “Boy, I think that stuff has affected your brain.” Everyone laughed. Everyone, that is, but her and me. Another monster asked if I was okay, and I nodded because I wanted them to stop looking at me, to stop thinking about me, to stop knowing that I was even there, because what I was seeing and what I was feeling was too personal to share with people whom I didn’t trust, even if I had been able to talk. It’s always mistrust that shuts me down, that balls me up, that makes me leave parties. It’s knowing that my reality isn’t “normal.” Yet, what is “normal” but society’s demonic child, and society is bullshit. All societies all the time are bullshit, and, that night I could no longer carry on the illusion of being an oh-so-normal person at an oh-so-normal party in an oh-so-normal society. This meant that there was there was no reason for me to stay, yet I was too balled-up to get out of my chair and, besides, I had no place to go.

Later, I found myself in bed, and out of the darkness came colors and patterns that flashed and revolved before my eyes. They comforted and delighted me all night long, and it was very good. When the darkness turned to gray, I went outside in the already muggy heat and sat atop a truck cab. There was a grove of water oaks nearby, and I watched them do a joy dance as the gray turned to blue and the sun moved down their branches. Then, other people got up, and called to me and looked for me, and when they found me, the trees no longer danced, and the kaleidoscope of night no longer comforted me, and I too had turned back into bullshit. People ruin things. That’s mostly what people are good for.

I have been blessed by hallucinogenics. I regret nothing. I would do them all again.

The art is called “Dizzy Thorns” and is by a fellow named Marcello from Potenza, Italy. Blow it up, and and stare at it for a few minutes. When the nausea, the fear, and the exhilaration become too much, you can turn away; but what if you couldn’t; what if it became your entire reality, and you didn’t know if it would ever go away?