The Effects of Insomnia on What Passes for a Human Mind (a rare glimpse into the depths)

Having a very loose idea about what the fuck this site is supposed to accomplish leaves one wide open to the blank canvas blues. Do i post about magic and the magical things happening in my life? or what about a post on psychedelics, or for that matter drugs in general and their effects on the lives of the sensitive people that use them. How about another vulgar astrology post with a side rant about how fucked up the world is; and by the way, why the fuck should anyone, outside the rulers of this system, be concerned about it collapsing into a pile of rotten, corrupt corpses that, we the people, could use to stoke the fires of our great and beautiful ascent into the gods we’ve been programmed to believe we are not? Maybe a delightful, poetic romp through the blasted caverns and ethereal dream-light of the lunar sphere. Oh, who gives a shit? Why choose one when i could just take all of those things and smash them into the crack pipe that works part time as my consciousness in between shifts at the gas station, take a massive lungful and see what comes out of my firearms and breeze-fingers?
The full moon was last night and i haven’t slept, the combination of psychic city sludge and selenite filtered solar reflections always makes my insomnia act up. Lack of sleep has never distressed me as it has some of my peers, my first hallucinatory experience was somewhere around 9 and it was caused by being consistently and quite amusingly awake for 5 days. I was taking a shower before school taking careful stock of my preadolescent sanity and noticing the odd sensations that accompany being awake for that many hours when i noticed some movement out of the corner of my eye. When i turned, with no small amount of horror, to  confront the uncharacteristic ambulation of what had, up until that very moment been inanimate and quite lifeless objects i was faced with quite a scene: my shampoo+conditioner bottle, a sea-foam green Pert Plus, was gyrating in a way that instantly relieved me of all my fear and replaced it with a mirth to rival Midas (in those blissful moments before he hugged his wife and tried to have an apple) a crazed and cacophonous cackling rose up from my tiny belly and i watched with the glee felt mainly by the mad as the bottle danced and moved its lagoon-green curves to a song that only we two could hear. I joined in and danced until the water went cold.
Now before you write everything I’ve written off as the ravings of a mad man who has obviously been that way for a very long time, let me say this: crazy people can’t tell when they’re being crazy and although in that moment i could not have told you for sure whether the bottle and i were dancing to the music of the spheres in “official reality”, i was certainly still aware of the possibility that not sleeping for 5 days could effect a person in ways that might alter perception in strange ways, and i’m proud to say that nearly 25 years later i can still tell when i am experiencing phenomena outside of “official reality”. Though these phenomena do seem to be increasing in frequency the more i do magical things…
With a little luck, and that one simple act of lunacy (i’m quite certain that those 5 days must have been around a particularly powerful full moon), my life was ruined forever and now i am forever thinking that under the label of every cereal box and hair-care product there lies the soul of a dancing machine confined to inanimate stationary statuary solely by the static inflexibility and well-restedness of our modern western minds. Later that year in the fourth grade i was given, for the first time, the opportunity to choose a topic for a research paper or book report all on my own. The paper was titled: The Effects of PCP and LSD on the Human Brain. It’s lost now but my parents still remember it with a woeful shake of their heads as a terrible precursor to a life filled to the brim with narcotics, near-death experiences, narcotics, close calls, court fees, narcotics, speeding tickets costing them 2,000 dollars in one go and through it all a noticeable lack of jail time or criminal record. My fascination with different states of consciousness and the potential of psychic augmentation of said consciousness with substances usually outlawed and often prescribed by the powers that be still burns within me and will certainly be a topic of much discussion in future.
Laying down the crack pipe for a moment i must interject a small history lesson. There are not many drugs i would not take or have not already ingested in one way or another in varying quantities and with astonishing consistency but that, for the most part, is behind me and this history lesson is not meant to glamorize the life of a junky who inexplicably survived to tell the tale but to illustrate my abiding interest in chemical brain enhancement and give you a brief and horrifying glimpse into the life of the man you’ve chosen to humor. Roll the tape.
My first forays into drugs were mild but as far as i can tell from my rigorous research and painful interrogations earlier than most of the humans outside the weird spheres i prefer to occupy. Marijuana was a godsend to a terribly awkward and quiet boy who was bullied mercilessly for being awkward and quiet; no longer was i worrying about what anyone else thought about anything, least of all myself and the questionable fashion decisions dictated by household income and a preference for comfortable clothes. High school was full of booze, more marijuana and many mushrooms. The fact that i graduated in four years with a sophomore gpa of 0.35 is a mystery of math and statistics that i will never understand. The best thing about high school was that it ended… and that i had my wisdom teeth out and was (over) prescribed that perfect panacea: the princely Percocet who, in all of his operatic opiate opulence, turned all the keys and opened all the doors that had kept me apart from the rest of the world. More than anything before or since Percocet made me feel like i was home and safe and as confident as i saw the rest of the world acting. My college experience could be summed up by the word “more”. More of everything; life, human contact and drugs of new and interesting varieties with the constant insufflation of cocaine being both the high and low light of the whole shebang and ending with a severe bout of double pneumonia, three hateful roommates, and the loss of 25 precious pounds from a frame that could not afford the loss of even a gram. Needless to say things did not get better from here: my opiate consume ion increased until the new “war” on prescription opiates jacked all the prices up and forced me to switch to heroin. “Buy the ticket take the ride”. In 2 weeks i had purchased my first needle and there began a slow motion sprint to the bedrock and tragic beauty that awaits us all at the very bottom. Say what you will about self destructive tendencies, drug abuse, and thrill seekers of all sorts; there is no better way to find out who one is and what one is capable of than by taking a thing as far as it will go and then, when one finds the edge, jumping with a smile to see what lies at the bottom. Three and a half years later i had to decide, in the presence of an actual angel or God who, for the record, either is or sounds just like a cross between Freddy Mercury and David Bowie, whether i would die by the gun in my hand or try something i hadn’t done since i started smoking weed daily at the ripe age of eleven. That was nine years ago.

I love my life. I found the love of my life at the bottom and we’ve walked the hidden paths up the far side of the chasm together ever since. And even in this year of fucked up space-weather, atrocities, assholes, artillery, and otherwise, i wouldn’t trade my life or my past for anything.
Damn, that got heavy, I’m not entirely sure what this post was supposed to be about but there it is: a brief and fucked up history of the asshole on the other side if the keyboard. Maybe next time i will pick a theme and stick with it, but probably not. I began this post the day after the full moon and at the time of finishing it looks like its been nibbled in half by the persistent efforts of a whole hoard of interstellar rodents not quite believing that the crunchy exterior isn’t just some sort of protective shell surrounding a great glowing glob of gouda. In that time i seem to have lost the plot, but all these ramblings are just an ingenious plot to seamlessly bring us the the point: no matter what kind of awful shit the Powers or powers that be are perpetrating; it could always be worse, AND it can always get better, the choice is often more in our control than we are led to believe. We can always choose to smile as we fall and enjoy the ride. Who knows what grand treasures or mysteries await us on the way down or at the bottom, or what we’ll find on our way back up the other side?