Blue Bear Seasons With Garlic: Vigorous Shake

I've started reading a book called 'Writing On Drugs' , and I'm finding it to be really good stuff. Lady named Sadie Plant wrote it. Check it out, its worth a read.

It might be kind of obvious to some of you now that I have a fascination with altered mental states. This book goes into some depth describing the influence of voluntarily altered mental states on the creative process and I'm all over that crap, lemme tell you.

I have no future career as a professional opium eater, sadly. What Coleridge and Baudelaire and them'uns had to purchase at the local apothecary shoppe I seem to posses by right of genetics. Not that I travel around in a perpetual haze (despite what some might think); no, just that I have an inner landscape that I'm pretty well able to traverse at whim. Even the really freaky parts. Their quest seemed to be finding the entrance to Alladins' Cave in order to stuff their pockets with gold doubloons. Mine seems to be finding something in there I can use to peel the gold foil off with so I can eat the chocolate inside.

Really, that's the punchline. It looks like valuable treasure, all that fascinating stuff in your brain, but its just candy, really. If you have a poverty of emotion and imagination in your everyday life, then taking something that allows you to hold dark discourse with Nyarlathotep is going to be an enrapturing experience you'll want to return to...particularly if the alternative is unrelievedly banal. The problem is: Brains are fun*, but you don't get much vacuuming done. Everyday life and everyday things are important, despite what religion and fancy and imagination and everything else would lead you away from believing. Changing the water in the dogs' dish is more valuable than anything you experience or 'learn' while under the influence of drugs.

The first and last time I ever took LSD is a case in point. Oh my goodness was I wasted. Oh heavens to Betsy yes;. But the perceptive shifts were nothing different than things I experienced on a nightly basis, in dreams, or even all that terribly different than some of the things I imagined vividly in daydreams. Furthermore, it was not only 'induced' imagination, it was 'enforced' imagination. And you had to watch, little Alex, you had no choice. It was going to last as long as it took the chemicals to run out of your system.

The 'wastedness' part of the show was kind of fun at first, but got really old after five hours, and after ten it was a real pain in the ass. Being too intoxicated to perform simple tasks blows. Seriously, there's nothing more annoying than over-boiled peas come to find out, particularly when you have to chase them around on a plate and kill them individually, and your manual dexterity is suffering and every time you finally poke one with a fork it bleeds greenish, cloudy lymphatic fluids and makes a disgusting tiny popping noise like a ripe carbuncle finally cutting loose...you get the picture? Yeah. And for that I paid money? I really rather would have had the chocolate doubloons. Chocolate tastes good and you can do crafts and shit with the foil. I mean really.

This is not to say that drugs aren't fun, because they are. As long as you use them for the occasional holiday from reality and you know what you want out of the experience, they're a delight. They just aren't really a means to any other end than simple temporary entertainment.

I met a girl years ago* who frequently used the phrase 'people who'd learned a lot of things from using acid' with a great deal of heartfelt reverence, as though what you and I would term 'burnouts' existed in some perpetual exalted state (one that you and I would term 'brain damage'.) People suffering from a medieval lack of personal hygiene who live on kale and shit in public aren't living in an exalted state. Maybe that looks romantic from the vantage point of a sheltered little suburban teenybopper, but watch them going in to pick up their disability check at the welfare office sometime and see how exalted that shit looks, and take careful note while they shed that 'exalted state' long enough to cash the fucker and not get kicked out of the bank. Squatting to take a dump in public because they've 'forsaken conventional mores' or are 'trying to shock the Man into a moment of reality' is still taking a dump in public, idiot. But oh no, she was all starry-eyed over this supposed 'alternative wisdom path', one of these college freshman types fresh from mommy and daddys' house in the suburbs who'll get allllllll sanctimonious and start in with the 'now, just because it isn't your reality doesn't mean blah blah blah, we have to be open to alternative modes of blah blah blah' and I had to say no, taking a dump out on the sidewalk because I'm too goddamn wasted to remember where the public bathrooms are certainly isn't something I'll be making a part of my chosen reality. Now go join a cult, you retard.

Oh wait...she did.

*snork*




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*particularly giant evil brains from outer space that drive flying saucers and kidnap women to bring back to their home planets for breeding purposes but then they get their tank that they float around in all shot up full of holes and all the gross fluid leaks out and the brain explodes and sick chunks of brain crud go flying around all over the place and some lands on the lady and shes all screaming and shit but the other guys rescue her and she falls in love with one of them but has an alien brain baby nine months later.

*one of my ex-husbands subsequent girlfriends. nothing gets you over the residual heartache of a broken marriage quicker than realizing that your ex is dating a self-inflicted revenge even sweeter than anything you could have cooked up on your own!