Shitting the Sun - first trip to Pluto

APR 5 2015

When the conversation turns to the topic of LSD experiences, people inevitably carry on praises about the colours, the heightened pleasure in music, and the sense of cosmic one-ness felt.

But you see, there's another interesting (and similarly primal) aspect of the aforementioned that no one ever warns about, perhaps as a sort of collective possession of this unspoken understanding that is nonetheless universal among those who've tripped before.  It's almost like a joke continually handed down from the previous generation to the newbies, the punchline thus: 'Because we experienced it alone, you're going to experience it alone too.  Welcome to the club!' 

I speak, of course, of shitting while on acid.

Entering the loo I realized I was alone for the first time since before the Undeniable Tripping Action had begun.  Once I locked the door to our small house’s sole bathroom, I was struck by a sense that was both novel and familiar at once: déjà vu, if you will.  I was immediately aware that I had entered an intricate machine which sent me here from my home world:  In there, time and space are sheared at an extreme.

The room was flying through space very fast, accelerating much more so in one direction than another such that the distance from the doorway to the toilet – ordinarily only two or three steps – was now stretched long enough in which to park a Volkswagen.

I strode across the room and assumed position on the throne.  The room – the “ship,” shall we say – continued to accelerate: I glanced back towards the door, and the square floor tiles had become such severe diamonds from the acceleration that I’d venture to say each one was roughly half the length of a tennis court.

There must have been a high-tension mass compressor embedded in this ship’s toilet, because not long after I sat was there suddenly little doubt I was anywhere but halfway through the process of shitting the sun; that isn’t to say literally our Sun but rather some object of collectively the same mass, a quantity that was even more doubtlessly at the same temperature.


This was surprising, seeing as my only consumption that day had been of previously-frozen taquitos and chilled habañero salsa, nary a pound at most.

 Moments after first pondering the fact that this experience shamelessly obliterated the laws of mass-conservation and thermodynamics as I knew them did the in-flight message automatically play.

           “At these speeds, so many collisions occur with stray neutrinos and similar particles that biological organisms will take on significant mass, particularly in the gastrointestinal tract.  Our airline features entangled-shield toilets.”

Well, I’m glad someone thought of that feature, because it’d sure be a bitch to travel near-luminal speeds without ‘em.  After a few minutes the deed was done, and I rose to wash my hands and get off this ship.  I took a quick glance in the tachyonic inverter and beheld an attractive though ultimately uninteresting man, and after we exchanged a hearty glance I decided not to waste any further time with him.

I strode a few miles to the door; I stretched out, my fleshy digits touching the doorknob, and twisted, actuating an ancient cam system to retract the door's bolt from the jamb's strike plate.  What if it hadn't worked?  Three-eights of an inch of metal could keep a man locked in here for a few hours, which for all he knew could be the rest of his life.

The instant I turned the knob, the uncountable trillions of quantum probability

waveforms collapsed into their conventionally comfortable states

I had seen that trip to Pluto - only momentarily glimpsed it, really, and began to see how what I call “information” is most readily defined as “that which can cause change to something else," whereupon I knew this was something I'd have to pursue to far greater ends in my lifetime.

Imagine A Penny

MAR 26 2016

Imagine a penny.  If you're like most people, you know just enough about a penny to distinguish it from all the other coins.  "Ah yes, the red one!"  If you know any of the following, consider yourself part of a rare breed:

• Which direction Lincoln is facing
• Where the year is stamped
• Where the minting facility is stamped
• How many times total (both faces of the coin) the words are "One Cent" stamped

These are stimuli that occur to us but which we filter out because they are unnecessary information: while your perceive everything, you only regard the minimum necessary to satisfy a situation.  Because you never need to know these details of the penny, you find yourself unable to remember them right now, even though you see pennies all the time.  Or if you don't, imagine something else that you do see all the time.  Money & credit cards, plant life around your home, or the architecture of buildings along your commute but which aren't ever your destination are all common examples.  It is this ability to filter that allows us to navigate complicated city routes without knowing the street names: we don't know what the front of every building on every street in the city looks like, but we know just enough to navigate using a few landmarks.  Our brain has boiled down the entire town to just a small handful of landmarks for a given trip and in the process saved much time, certainly an evolutionary advantage.

The marvelous perception-altering nature of LSD is such that you perceive the wonderful patterns, textures, and details of all sorts that're all around us - in nature, in machines, in people's faces, everywhere - which we normally ignore as extraneous stimuli and simply discard any notice of, let alone appreciation.  It is a way of seeing (and hearing, and tasting, and generally experiencing sensations of all types and origin) that we have not experienced for a very long time, perhaps not since before we can remember.  But to experience the goliath, unyielding continuity of reality with an adult brain and understanding is nothing short of breathtaking.

The Sound Drug

Music is the highest drug you can take.  Sure you've heard all sorts of people who insist that they "get their best high off of LIFE" say foolish-sounding things like this, but c'mon and hear me out.  Can it get you higher than heroin?  I don't know, with a hundred percent surety, because I've never taken heroin.  But what heroin does is give you a chemical shortcut to happiness.  It activates you, it activates you super hard, but in one direction, no?
Sit at the symphony and hear dozens or even over a hundred people belting out their full capacity, channeling their concentrated souls through their instruments.  That isn't one direction, that's a thousand bloody directions all coming at you at once.  You aren't taking one chemical and shooting it into your arm or the space twixt your toes, you're plugging your head and your crotch and your heart into the souls of a whole stage full of people, and not just them but the artisans before them who crafted those instruments too.

Music is a totally insane thing.  There's not a reason it should "work."  The sounds that any man makes are dreamt of in the space of pure originality in that person's mind ergo necessarily completely foreign to the experiences of the listener, yet the listener doesn't find them offensive, or revolting, or even unusual (unless of course that's a compliment): they find them pleasant, reaffirming, resonant, relatable, and even comforting.  The fact that we all group around certain songs can't be irrelevant to the fundamentals of human nature, and by extension the universe (I understand if you see that as a dramatic leap, which today it surely is.  But of course every thing is a variation on the same "things," and the same could be said for vibrations, so it isn't a tremendous stretch to say music is the most extreme & advanced articulation of the fundamental universe we yet have).  The facts that certain songs sound excellent in every genre, or that metalheads can be swayed by electronic freaks, and that classical die-hards can be thrilled by hip-hop compositions, are not trivial.

In that way, music is a critical interaction twixt people much the way that writing-&-reading is...except far more fundamental.  Where writing requires a person to take the interwoven complexity of his thoughts and emotions and force them to condescend to the level of language only to be re-interpreted up an identical but reversed pathway through the reader, music bypasses all these steps completely: a musician & a listener are a pure, evolved, human sense communicating with another human sense.  It's one [or many] people -- temporary collections of energy, vibrations -- creating vibrations to be received by other people, other vibrating collections of energy.  It is surely among the purest forms of one mind talking to and actually understanding another outside of literally Being John Malkovich, that is to say experiencing not just a person's physical sensations but the entire worldview that informs their 'soul,' if I may take and use such an overly-dramatic and over-employed word (for I feel here, now, it is necessary).

So to get back to the point, music may just be the highest drug we can take (on our own, at least.  To steal much popular culture before me, "the most fun you can have with your clothes on.").  With music we aren't just accelerating our mind's chemicals with one [admittedly complex] chemical that we smoke or snort or shoot or swallow.  We are intoxicating ourselves with the minds of others, with the exorbitantly complex interactions that are going on inside our fellow man (there is a universe inside each of us).  We are getting high off of their brain chemicals, by extension their entire beings, for a body could not exist without a brain and vice-versa.  Name a fan of narcotics who does not identify among their most enjoyable activities when high "listening to music."  From weed, liquor, and LSD up to cocaine, barbiturate pills, and heroin, and everything in between, music remains universally enjoyable and even essential to the experience of any given drug, commonplaces like marihuana and liquor included (to say the very least.  I could include sex and Netflix on my list of narcotics if I were so inclined). The point is these are all things people do -- absolutely all of them, from the most wholesome to the most depraved -- to make their situation better, by whatever their present notion and definition of "better" is.  And all of these people include music in their plan for betterness.  All of them.

In no way are we more connected with one another - even if at a distance - than though music.  And that comfort that comes from connectedness is the thing for which we're all looking; it's the comfort that sells every Coke in the country, and every square of LSD too.  There's some Toot, Whistle, Plunk, and Boom in all of us.





The full movie Being John Malkovich appears to be available free on YouTube, at the time of this posting, leastways.

Forever'll Never Come

That feeling when opening a new handle, like "This shall last forever!"
But forever is never as long as your doctor and your wallet would have you hope. But the inner groove of every album keeps telling you, "forever'll NEVER come baby!"

Liquor

It's curious

it loves you
like a cat

it spits at your trifles
yet uplifts your victories

makes you fight better
encourages you to write better
bolsters you from the sidelines, no matter how hard you've been beaten
even though it gives its fair share of the punches.

always loves you when you're in need
always offers a helping hand when you're struggling

but never hesitates to stand holdin a hammer 'round your coffin.

She shoves you into the abyss as readily as she offers a hand out,
she'll always help you get where it is you want to go.
She doesn't offer you any advice, though she's centuries of knowledge.
No, she doesn't hold a map and doesn't give you her opinion.  Wherever it is you're trying to get, she puts her hand on your knee and pushes the pedal further to the floor.

she tells you not what door you're opening.
She only passes you the key, and puts her hand gently on yours as you turn it.

Anthony's Two Muses by Ron Lewis

Rock n Roll

We've all had that moment.  You can't tell when you look into our eyes, but we have, trust me.

We've "needed a moment alone," or "had to do something," or "taken a quick break at the bathroom."  It's a low moment, when it happens, but it's a soul-restorer and power-giver the instant it's over.  We feel like we're on the verge of heaving, and more times than not we actually do fill that ratty porcelain throne with things we'd previously ingested.

And for a split second, our entire history dissolves, our image - of which we are well-aware - is nowhere to be found in our consciousness, and our concerns number zero.  We exist, almost as another person entirely, in that moment, purely alone and purely at peace.  We're wholly absent from care about the opinion of a single other sentient creature, and we exist purely in that tiny haven.  We are glad to be alive, not from fear of having been dead, but simply from utmost relief and being so comparatively comfortable, tender from shifting twixt these existential sensations so rapidly.

We flush the toilet, wash our hands, take another swig of whiskey to gauge our level, slug a few pegs worth of water to trim the sails, and place our hand on the doorknob.  The transformation happens, from the temporary vessel of random humanity back into whoever we are.  Then we're ready.  We twist the knob and step through the portal, greeted by compatriots, embarrassingly transparent wannabes, advisors, and select genuine comrades, all refreshing our momentarily forgotten personality, all unaware of the horrors transpired behind an unassuming door.

We're champions once more, immortal for having purged signals of our weakness, gods shedding their mortality.