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I’ve mentioned before, and talked in some detail about, having had three experiences where I met people and instantly felt the presence of mutually attractive forces and knew that our destinies were about to become entangled and the trajectories of our lives would be changed. For whatever reason our effect on each other was like a chemical reaction or a vehicle collision. Maybe the best way to put it is that we were like characters in a story, not just an anecdote but a proper story, where every interaction must mean something and every one of the principals must undergo some degree of transformation.

When I refer to the forces as attractive I mean that in the most fundamental sense of the word. Not necessarily romantic or sexual in nature but pure attraction. I think I’ve known instinctually every time that this mysterious power might have more potential if it took some form other than the two spheres I’ve just mentioned. Still that’s always where things seem to end up, possibly through my own weakness or a human tendency to seek out the most comfortable and familiar explanation for whatever it is that’s at play.

I can’t take total responsibility as in each case I only made up half of the equation – and in this case in particular even less than that.

The first time was with a boy named Jordan on the day before 9/11 – we took a psychoactive overdose of cough medicine together and then found ourselves romantically coupled while remaining entirely physically platonic. In the wake of the national tragedy we went to visit his parents in rural Michigan. Things began to fall apart rather rapidly: in less than a week he was institutionalized and I was returning home to go back to college while reevaluating my relationship with injection drugs.

The second time was with a girl I’ve been calling Rocky whenever she pops up in these stories. I have a certain superstition against saying her name as it often causes her to manifest and she has a tendency to indiscriminately invite destructive chaos into her own life and those of the people around her. Several people have been asking after her recently however and as I haven’t heard anything for several years I’ve decided to risk it.

I met her as Jen Kitchen and not long after she started to go by Rochelle.

We met in Chicago toward the beginning of the Chinese Lunar Year of the Golden Fire Pig. She taught me how to hitchhike and we made plans to get married before settling into a turbulent triangle pattern with a man she didn’t tell me about until we were already entwined. As is so often the case she didn’t end up with either one of us. The last time I saw her she caused me and some friends to get arrested in Tijuana and I spent over a month coordinating her repatriation and release with several entities.

This was in 2009 in the days immediately following my father’s death. I had recently been living in Oakland but moved back in with my parents when his condition worsened and I was the one of my siblings most able to suspend my life to act as live in caretaker. After he passed I spent a bit of time training my mother how to safely pilot her powered wheelchair but I essentially returned to my traveling lifestyle.

I met the Tinies when I went to an Oakland house called Tuna Town to invite some guests to a small haunting ceremony in a nearby vacant house at the bottom of an apartment building. I struggled a little bit over whether or not I would use that name in this piece but decided to keep it for the sake of honesty and accuracy. Whenever I had cause to refer to these two women collectively to any outside party I called them exactly that: the Tinies.

With all that said I won’t be using their actual names and I thought it would be funny to use replacement names from jötnar or giantesses so in this story they will be Skadi and Etain.

I don’t know either of their exact heights but as a six foot four inch man most people I meet are shorter than me and some, like Skadi and Etain, are significantly shorter than me. If I had to guess I’d say they both probably weighed around one hundred pounds to give some kind of notion of scale. Unlike the first two incidents I referred to we didn’t form a unit from the first moment we laid eyes on each other but rather several days and over six hundred miles later in Portland.

I was with the friend I’ve been referring to as Sugar Tea and we were both dressed as colorful but threatening witches. While working on the haunted house with Popsicle we had the good fortune of stumbling across a dumpster outside of a Spirit Halloween Superstore that was throwing away all of the floor samples of everything that couldn’t be sold as new. We each wore the kind of “fancy” witch hats that were just starting to be mass produced around that time – bright metallic colors with cloth flowers, feathers and bits of tulle.

Beyond that we were probably wearing any number of colored wigs, loud skirts and jackets that probably involved sequins and layers of striped and patterned tights. Neither of us would have been shy with the makeup and collections of talismans had been multiplying around each of our necks. One of us was holding a plastic mobster style Tommy Gun and pointed it at the person who answered the door. This turned out to be Skadi and she immediately closed the door back in our faces.

The best way to describe what Skadi looked like in 2009 was that she was exactly the kind of girl that would be cast to play Tiny Tim in a regional production of A Christmas Carol – she wore her hair short and her eyes were large and naturally expressive. She was wearing a hat made from the mask, or face fur, of a badger or similarly sized animal. Neither of us had ever seen her before. We turned to each other and spoke in the kind of voice that Skeksis use to describe Gelflings in Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal:

“Small… Frightened..”

We’ve grown apart since then but Sugar Tea and I had this occasional psychic connection where we would spontaneously react to a situation by doing the exact same character in the exact same voice. The most striking example had been when we were biking together in Chicago and a passing motorist told us that the light had turned red even though neither of us were moving. We both instantly started singing in the tune of Roxanne:

“Douche-Baaag… You don’t have to point out the red light…”

I suppose the best way of explaining it is that we were like an improv comedy team. It’s not really important – I’m just trying to put our mutual Skeksis impersonation into some kind of larger context. Anyway it was Etain who really looked like the Gelfling from the movie.

Her features are delicate and almost painfully beautiful. Her hair is brown now so I assume that’s the natural color but in 2009 it was blonde and more or less standard fairytale Princess length. The two of them together gave off some serious Brian Froud energy.

It’s frustrating but I can’t really remember how much any of us talked in Oakland. We must have talked some because the energy that directed us to form a unit in Portland couldn’t have not existed at this early stage but I simply can not remember. I’d baked a pie for the haunting, sweet potatoes and garlic, a lot of people didn’t like that but I remember both of them liking it. What I’m trying to say is there must have been some kind of early sense of affinity – we liked the same things.

By chance or plan we met back up in Portland.

Skadi and Etain were traveling the country together and occasionally playing shows in something between a long road trip and an actual tour. Somewhere it had been discussed that all three of us were musicians and singer-songwriters and I was curious and excited to see their music and they were curious and excited to see mine and I set up a show for the three of us at my friend Badger’s house on Fessenden.

It just so happens that my set that night was recorded so I might as well throw in a link here if anybody wants to listen to it. It’s a bit atypical as Badger is improvising guitar parts after having nearly died of an overdose mere moments before we went on stage. A goth band called Swelter & Flay with an energetic frontman named Adam Yoshizumi that everybody called Nip Cave also played and got recorded. The recordings were done by a kid from San Diego called Scraggles because he used to be a tattered looking junkie but I only ever knew him in his cleaned up, dapper phase:

https://scragz.bandcamp.com/album/2009-11-14-st-johns

Anyway it was around this point that I started to become aware of the thing that was growing between the three of us, I could say that it was easier to recognize because I’d experienced something like it before but really it was unmistakable every single time. At this stage of pure potential I had an intuition about the thing that was beginning to take shape:

“Both or Neither”

I want to be very clear about the fact that I’m not one of those guys who assume that every woman in the world wants me. In High School I was a lot like Jon Cryer’s character of Duckie in Pretty in Pink in that I developed close aromantic friendships with the girls that I had crushes on in a way that felt safe to me in terms of the natural fears of rejection and abandonment. What I’m trying to say is that it’s my fundamental nature to assume a woman doesn’t want me even if all evidence is pointing to the contrary.

I could feel that something was taking form between the three of us and we were beginning to form a unit and that for the health of that unit I needed to keep my relationship with both of them roughly symmetrical. I’m doing a bad job of explaining this – maybe it will make more sense like this: I was recently telling this story to my wife and she was curious to see what Skadi looked like and when I found recent pictures it didn’t seem to make any sense to her until I found an old picture of Skadi and Etain together and then she could see it.

On some level I must have been seeing Skadi and Etain as a single person – or rather I saw an equation that had me on one side of it and both of them on the other. I don’t know the most about their relationship before this point except that they both grew up outside of New York City together and had known each other since around Fifth Grade and had been doing things together for a long time and were maybe in the process of figuring out where one of them ended and the other one began in their own relationship.

Whether or not we had already decided that we would be traveling together at this early stage I knew with certainty that it was coming. There was a palpable thrill of discovery and constant hunger for more coming from both sides when I talked to them – either individually or the three of us in a group. There was no question that I would be forming relationships with them and I was conscious of a need for balance and a desire to ensure that these relationships were satisfying and positive for everyone so I formed this resolve:

“Both or Neither”

Can I be guilty of wanting to be all things to all people? I think I can. It’s probably a thing that everybody experiences to some degree but most likely I do a bit more than most. The overarching theme of this entire collection of writings is the American Underground of collective spaces centered on art and music – a landscape we all flock to in order to create, in order to belong and in order to be seen. Of those three I think the third is the most important and motivating to me personally.

My resolve did not last particularly long. The thing that ignites desire in me is capricious and difficult to understand. Once it was a woman’s husky, almost masculine voice that turned out to be the result of a struggle with throat cancer. Once I stumbled across a zine that a woman in my social circle made where she referred to herself as hideous and impossible to be desired. Something in me might have seen this as a challenge and for some time I pursued her.

More often than not it is the feeling of being desired. Rarely was this ever expressed to me without inspiring a resolve to at least attempt to reciprocate. Basically never if the other person is cute about it. My single physical dalliance with another male only happened because the boy in question spent a night patiently following me with subtle yet obvious purpose. I’d been propositioned by men in the past but it had always felt crass and transactional.

Anyway any illusion of keeping things symmetrical dissipated when my desire was ignited specifically for Skadi. I remember the exact moment it happened. Skadi was singing a song about wanting butterflies to come alight on her and cover her body. She calls herself a creep in it at one point. I just listened to it again and it seems to be about the way butterflies settle onto a surface when they are worn out, out of energy and preparing for death:

“Come on butterflies, Come to me when you die”

To extend the Lepidoptera reference I was drawn in like a moth to a flame. Skadi came into sharper focus and to focus on one thing necessarily means not focusing on others – Etain began to blur. But in an odd way it feels like Etain was always a part of it even after she left the picture and Skadi and I continued on without her. Somewhere in my head or my heart I constructed a Frankenstein’s monster with parts of both of them or maybe it already existed and had taken shape due to the way they were moving through the world together.

The house show was a party where we all were drinking and would have to find sections of couch or floor to sleep on. I don’t think we were kissing yet or anything but Skadi and I did affectionately share space when we went to sleep. Etain met a boy at the party that she was also sharing space with that night – he was closer to her height and looked nice and average in every way imaginable. I could be wrong about the kissing part.

From the next morning onward I moved into their world. I think everywhere we went that day was places they wanted to show me. They took me to a little pink and yellow gingerbread cottage called Keana’s Candyland where they gave us free cookies. It looks like the place has sadly gone out of business but it’s also significant because of what happened with it’s business card.

Later in Los Angeles me and Lux were preparing for a big performance with our band Voiheuristick Necromorph and visited a large Botanica Wholesale warehouse called Indio Products for props, candles and other ephemera. You are not allowed to buy anything there unless you own a business so I gave them the business card from Keana’s Candyland and said I was buying the products for my shop. On my next visit they had contacted Keana and discovered my ruse so I was never able to shop there again.

The next spot we visited in Portland was a large nature preserve where Etain had created a gigantic nest by weaving together grasses and branches. It had been tousled and scattered some by the elements but the basic shape was still there. We spent a long time just quietly walking through the forest and along the water. I found an oddly shaped wishbone, or furcula, that most likely came from a goose and tucked it into the band of my leather biker’s cap.

Eventually it was time to go to sleep. Skadi and Etain had been staying in the basement of a slightly older married couple with a baby. I’m not sure how they met or ended up sleeping there. I heard some vague thing about this couple going through infidelity or a similar marital problem but it had nothing to do with Skadi and Etain.

I only briefly met the guy as we were coming in. He had black hair in a heavily pomaded Elvis style pompadour. He had been drinking but wasn’t very drunk or was the quiet kind of very drunk person. The inside of the house looked oddly timeless as if it could have existed any time between the 1950’s and the present – kind of like my grandparents’ house in Arkansas. He seemed remarkably nonplussed about the fact that his guests were suddenly bringing a tall creepy goth man home.

I’m trying to remember how we arranged ourselves on the fold out bed but I think I was in the middle with Skadi to my left and Etain to my right. Even if it was a different layout Etain had to have been next to one of us when we started making out. I’m not going to go into baseball bases or anything but Skadi and I did make out that night. It wasn’t much but if you’ve ever had to lay next to a couple who are messing around and pretend to sleep you know exactly how uncomfortable it can be.

As far as I know Etain was never attracted to me in a romantic or sexual sense. She felt the same attractive force that all three of us experienced when we came into contact but it never moved beyond the pure potential form. I constantly worry that I’m not doing a good enough job explaining or describing what that force felt like. In the simplest terms it’s like what happens when a certain rock catches your attention and you pick it up and put it in your pocket:

“These things go together now.”

That really doesn’t describe it well at all but the best I can do is throw scraps of paint like Jackson Pollock because when you get right down to it I don’t understand it or know what it looks like. I’m like any ignorant human stumbling through a world of natural forces and phenomena with no Isaac Newton to explain or turn them into laws.

I can’t pretend to know what Etain was feeling or experiencing at the time but the way I imagine it is like our initial meeting felt like a fairy tale where I was some kind of enchanted creature that she and Skadi discovered together in their travels. Maybe I’m putting myself on too much of a pedestal – I was a new friend they had both just met and were excited to get to know and travel with and ideally this would happen without making her feel like a third wheel.

I imagine everybody has had the experience of forming an inseparable trio with two close companions and then feeling the shift in energy when the other two people start making out. It’s like your world is closing off and turning away from you. I had actually just experienced the same thing with Sugar Tea and Popsicle and had even had a little crush on Popsicle which always makes it worse.

I know even less about whatever Skadi was feeling. I did get the sense that they had been joined at the hip and her legs were starting to get restless and there was just a bit of figuring out her identity that she needed to do alone. They both did. I was talking to some friends recently about the experience of growing up in a family that’s connected to some utopian subculture – like how I was born on a commune and another friend of mine had parents that followed a spiritual guru and another one is the child of an extremely liberal minister.

My theory about this is when you grow up in this kind of family mythology and world building are a fundamental part of the family identity and when it becomes time for the children to pick their own realities the smallest things can cause the siblings to split apart. I don’t talk to mine at all and in the other two examples I mentioned there are dramatic schisms as well. Anyway I thought some of this might have been happening with Skadi or Etain who were not related but had practically grown up together.

Skadi and Etain were twenty-five and twenty-four years old respectively when I met them. They had gone to art schools but not the same one. Maybe they had had problems over boys before. They told me a horrible story about an abusive ex-boyfriend of Etain’s who demanded she kill and eat a rodent that she’d been keeping as a pet. Maybe it was someone who had also dated Skadi at some point. There’s so much of this story I don’t know.

In the morning Etain was understandably upset that we had made out in the bed while she was in it. After that night the three of us never shared a bed again. But we did continue traveling together and headed South from Portland toward Oakland, Los Angeles and eventually my mother’s house in San Diego.

Part Two

It’s possible that the thing where LSD turns you into a vampire already existed for my friends Sugar Tea and Drew because when they took over Grandma’s House in Oakland they changed the name to Count Dracula Africa [Note: I was in error, the name was Castle Preschool] but I remember the exact moment it happened for me. It was Winter at the Blog Cabin, probably 2007, and I was playing with the desktop computer by the door that miraculously never got stolen. If we weren’t cooking a communal meal in the kitchen or hosting a show in the backyard this computer was the social hub of the entire house and everyone who hung around it.

There was an actual couch facing an actual television with an actual VCR exactly one room over but half the time somebody was living on the couch as they waited for a room to become available and more importantly we rarely had the attention span for long format VHS movies. Everybody was around the age where he hadn’t grown up with the internet but we had grown up with MTV, music videos and edgy sketch comedy shows like The State and Kids in the Hall.

YouTube was the perfect format for us. In a way you could say it was a logical extension of a punk and hardcore scene where the most popular format for music was the seven inch single. We watched a lot of music videos and Adult Swim shows but we also watched a lot of clips from old talk shows like the one where Nina Hagen and Don Rickles riffed off of each other on the Merv Griffin Show. With everybody crowded around the important thing was to keep the entertainment moving and every time a new video was selected the rallying cry could be heard in five seconds or less:

“Make it big!”

It didn’t matter that every video on every day before it had been toggled over to full screen mode and whoever was sitting at the mouse and keyboard would inevitably make the same decision themselves – they still had to be reminded every single time. YouTube didn’t have the fancy algorithms it does now where it acts like a surrogate music nerd friend and offers you choice obscure tracks in whatever genre you’re listening to.

It was still possible to do the “rabbit hole” thing where if you typed in a weird song or bit of animation other weird stuff from the same uploader would pop up on the side and if you kept clicking on the the third thing down or so you’d end up with something truly unexpected. It just wasn’t as self consciously curated as it is now – it’s kind of difficult to describe the difference for somebody who hasn’t experienced it for themselves but it was definitely different.

On this particular day instead of using the “rabbit hole” method I was experimenting with typing random bits of phrases into the search bar. What I was doing was kind of like the process of making weird AI generated pictures now except there were no AIs and the only thing my phrases could do was pull up unexpected things that already existed. I would type in something like “unfortunately dangerous child” and see what kind of video it gave me.

Right now that pulls up the trailer for a 2001 made for TV movie but back then it would have been something completely different because there was way less stuff up there.

Anyway the serendipitous phrase I chose to type in was “vampire kittens” and the life changing result was DJ Bobo’s Vampires are Alive from the Eurovision Song Contest. It wasn’t the official video I will insert below or one of the large scale production live performances it was a fan video featuring a montage of cats and kittens baring their canine teeth to the camera. I just searched for it again and as far as I can tell it doesn’t exist anymore – most likely it got taken down for a copyright strike, another thing that barely ever happened on 2007 YouTube.

Eurodisco, especially Italodisco, was having a bit of a moment in our house that was about to extend to the American Underground at large with labels like 100% Silk and Italians Do It Better. I’d been interested in the genre since I’d stumbled across a copy of Alexander Robotnick’s Fuzz Dance EP back in High School but now my housemates were introducing me to groups like Den Harrow and Scotch. DJ Bobo isn’t Italian but the song and video were catchy, campy and full of vampires and seeing as we were all on lots of acid we had no choice but to turn into vampires ourselves.

Me and Sugar Tea already had a nightly ritual where we’d walk all the way over to the 7-11 by UIC to fuck with the guy who worked the graveyard shift and I’d just started wearing an Otello Pelle black leather trench coat with a gold rococo silk hood – the pieces just kind of fell into place. It wasn’t the first time that wandering the Chicago streets at night had led me into becoming part of a vampire coven – way back in 1999 me and Marianne had the “Triple V Club”: vegan virgin vampires.

It was close to this time that I started to become acquainted with New Orleans and Mardi Gras. The city had always been the destination for the Miss Rockaway Armada but after Homeland Security burnt The Garden of Bling the thing that actually got me there was the CAVE tour. I may or may not have made it to the 2008 Mardi Gras but by 2009 it was an annual tradition for me to travel down at least two weeks before Ash Wednesday to participate in the whole party season.

The actual dates move around each year based on whatever phase the moon was in, the last time the Pope took a shit or something equally esoteric but every time Mardi Gras ends it marks the beginning of Lent. With that you inevitably get discussions of what everybody will be giving up in observance of the period and everybody asking you if you will be observing Lent and what you will be depriving yourself of. I eventually did go through a Catholic phase but by that time I’d already been observing Lent at least jokingly for a solid couple of years.

The first time around I gave up old timey music. At that point in time you couldn’t swing a dead cat in New Orleans without hitting a group of buskers with a jug band, percussive washboard, washtub bass or all of the above. When The Bus came through on the way to the International Noise Conference it had parked on the concrete slab by the railroad tracks but John Benson was having trouble with the sound system and the crowd was getting fidgety.

I ran off The Bus and immediately found a group of musicians walking by led by a dude in a kilt with a megaphone and accordion. Figuring that people would start leaving if something didn’t start happening I invited them to play for the crowd as a stop-gap measure. Not long after the kinks were worked out and the PA came to life so me and Rotten Milk started playing as Envy without so much as a warning or “last song” to the band playing outside.

Was it rude? Certainly, I can be and often am a total asshole but with the number of people all choosing to play the same kind of music around the same time that year it was inevitable that they would be seen as expendable. Also it probably doesn’t sting as bad that a group of noise kids are acting like snobs when the style of music you play has populist appeal with the general American public.

Anyway I figured that as I was leaving New Orleans for the foreseeable future I was unlikely to run into any old-timey bands over the next 46 days so it made perfect sense to say I’d be giving up old-timey music performances for Lent.

I don’t know for sure when the blood thing happened. It could have been any of the Mardi Gras seasons between 2009 and 2011 and I don’t have any concrete corroborating details to pin it in place. My vampire schtick was getting baroque – Ajax had given me a curly white wig in Los Angeles and I’d found the wool jacket in the Apgar free box I started turning into a frock coat.

It easily could have been the year I started performing Harry Nilsson’s Lime in the Coconut as an occult ritual because that would explain why I was carrying an especially sharp knife.

I was sitting in a bar called Mimi’s at the edge of the Marigny, tripping on acid and talking to a woman I’d never met before. She was a conventionally attractive older woman with most likely bleached blonde hair, pretty much what you’d call a cougar, and she was having some kind of quarrel with the man she was traveling with. I have no idea which of us first broached the idea or how it came up but she was asking me to cut her.

She wasn’t already covered in scars so this clearly wasn’t a habitual thing for her but at the same time I didn’t usually go around cutting strange women either. I can’t say if this was before or after the Bleak End at Bernie’s tour where I started cutting myself during my performances because I can’t figure out what year this was. Maybe you’re one of those people who think everything happens for a reason. I wouldn’t say I am, not exactly anyway, but out of all the people she could have run into who would have likely tried to talk her out of it she ended up with me: ready, willing and with a freshly sharpened blade.

I made short diagonal cuts on the fleshy part of the back of her arm and I wasn’t shy about it. The first one wasn’t a scratch, it was a mild but respectable gash, and with this first cut I raised the wound to my lips and began to drink. She hadn’t specifically requested that I feed on the blood but she wasn’t objecting either. I haven’t had too many other opportunities to feed on human blood but under the circumstances it tasted almost electric and at the same time like I was consuming her sadness.

Obviously I understand that this whole thing is cringey as fuck. When I was about 16 years old I tried to go to an 18 and up goth club called Soil and while I didn’t get in the parking lot was full of Vampire: The Masquerade LARPers who talked about “feeding” on one another. A few months later the girl I’d been trying to go with was living in a pod of goths inside an Oceanside housing complex and when I went to visit her all of her housemates flocked around to tell me about how their character was clan Toreador but his chosen instrument was an electric guitar and he rode a motorcycle or to show me Marilyn Manson fan art they’d made with their blood smeared all over it.

When you add in the fact that I was doing all of this in New Orleans the only thing that could have made it douchier would have been if Brad Pitt and Nicolas Cage were the ones doing it in the middle of the French Quarter as a drunken dare with a special knife from a Marie Laveaux Voodoo Shoppe or some shit. Anyway I was the one doing it and it just goes to show that I can’t always be the “cool guy” in my own stories – in this one I quite literally suck.

Every time I’d go to New Orleans I’d make sure to visit a shop called Suda Salvage out on Jefferson Highway that sold discount food and beverage with damaged packaging or past it’s expiration date at rock bottom prices. This time around I’d found a few of the individual serving cans of fresh pineapple juice and my shoulder bag was full of them. This detail actually makes me think I was abstaining from alcohol at the time which would make me think was 2011 except for the fact that I didn’t learn I had Hepatitis C until that Summer.

Anyway a friend from the Rockaway named Wendell was in town – I put a picture of him next to a Coast Guard that looks like Brendan Fraser on one of the Rockaway chapters but for the sake of visualization think early male pattern baldness and a mustache. He was either making himself a cocktail that required pineapple juice or tripping like I was and chugging the stuff but either way he kept coming up to me to ask for another can every twenty minutes or so.

This was made awkward by the fact that every time he came up I was cutting this lady or drinking her blood or we were just psychotically staring into each other’s eyes but every time he nervously tapped me on the shoulder it had that kind of Rodney Dangerfield finger-in-the-collar energy if you get what I’m saying. What should have been more awkward was the fact that we were doing all of this while sitting at the literal bar but it was a packed night and nobody seemed to particularly notice – most likely they’d seen worse.

She must have been ordering drinks because I definitely wasn’t and we were sitting there for a good while. It wasn’t immediate but eventually she asked for a second cut. I don’t know what we would have talked about in the between time – maybe we were just having a staring contest like a couple of annoyed cats but eventually whatever she had gotten from the first cut wore off and she wanted a second one.

The second cut was slightly deeper than the first one and once again I raised her arm to my mouth and drank. By now you can probably guess what happened next – there was a length of time and more requests for pineapple juice in between but eventually she asked for another. A third and final slice.

This isn’t Goldilocks – the third cut was not a happy medium between the first and second and it wasn’t the Cat Stevens song as popularized by Sheryl Crow either. The first cut was not the deepest – the third one was. I tried to ensure with this cut that she wouldn’t under any circumstances ask for another one and I might have overdone things a certain amount. The blood was significantly darker this time around. It wasn’t gushing out of control or anything but it did look almost black and it tasted like it came from a deeper place.

At this point I stood up from the bar and left. It’s possible that my friends were now ready to move on to a new parade and party but I also wanted to be finished with the interaction. I was trying to communicate with that last cut “you shouldn’t want to endlessly get cut over and over” but there were probably better ways of going about it – like not cutting someone repeatedly and drinking their blood for example.

She may have ended up needing stitches but I don’t think she was bleeding uncontrollably for the rest of the night or in danger of losing too much blood. Really I don’t know though – I never saw her again for the rest of Mardi Gras.

When Lent began with Ash Wednesday that year I decided to give up blood. There seemed to be several good reasons for this: drinking a stranger’s blood isn’t exactly safe from a disease perspective, it felt like I was taking on too much of her negative emotions along with the blood and I didn’t feel entirely ok with my role in cutting her over and over.

I didn’t drink blood again at future Mardi Gras celebrations but saying I was giving it up for Lent became my go-to until the year where I was Catholic. There’s a piece that goes into it in detail called No Weapon Formed Against Me Shall Prosper but the short version was I became Catholic on a Summer Solstice because I felt like I was becoming too dependent on prescription opiates and needed a break. I pledged not to take any at least until the next Summer Solstice and I wasn’t drinking alcohol much either because I knew about my Hep C by this time.

It was a period of time when I was getting a ton of physical exercise and abstinence and asceticism began to feel like drugs to me along with my weekly communion wafer. This time when Lent began in 2012 I went and got marked with ashes and decided to give up sugar and caffeine at the same time for this one. The sudden absence of coffee might have given me a headache or two at the beginning but I was getting near endless energy from constant exercise and was likely on a manic episode.

My sister was offended because I wouldn’t eat any cake at her wedding and the chocolate came from the cacao plantation I’d visited her next to in Panama. I wasn’t going to be budging though – I took the whole thing very seriously. For the last half of Lent I was on the Trapped in Reality tour with Generation and Sister Fucker. It worked out that I was somewhere in Texas for an Easter Sunday service where the congregation was older and wore a satisfying amount of pastels and we wound up in New Orleans that night.

Unfortunately we got into town just a little bit too late to be able to go see the community production of Salome in City Park but the warehouse we were playing at did have lots of coffee and fresh baked pies allowing me to really wild out on the previously forbidden treats. From a spiritual standpoint it felt like my most carnal Lenten observance as the things I chose to forego were indulgences I took actual pleasure in.

It hadn’t been planned from the beginning but by the time I was back in Los Angeles I realized that having previously given up blood and then sugar (ignoring the caffeine) if I were to next give up sex and then give up magic the year after that I could make a Red Hot Chili Peppers joke: Blood Sugar Sex Magic. I had never been a particular fan of the band but certain circumstances were causing them to pop up in the general mythology and symbology.

A girl who kind of looked like Harry Potter who was in a popular LA punk band had worked for Anthony Kiedis as a nanny and he had apparently started aggressively hitting on her so she distributed his personal phone number to all her guy friends in the scene as a mild form of retaliation. She had actually been coming on to me but the way she went about it caused me to freeze up and once I finally realized how cool and hot she was she had, rightfully so, moved on and I’d missed my chance.

I was setting up a show for Griffin – Sewn Leather and John Root – Level Anchorage at Dem Passwords and their only request for the show was that they wanted to play with Kiedis. It was a somewhat prestigious and popular gallery, though I didn’t know if that penetrated his orbit, and the only thing I could do was try.

I hadn’t used the number yet but I sent a text with the show details asking if he might be into doing a solo set as the early persona Tony Flow. I did get a text back:

“Who is this?”

I might have been overestimating the power of my own name recognition when I wrote back “Ossian” and that was the end of the conversation. I also came across and read a copy of Scar Tissue around this time and thought it was hilarious how he absolutely imploded every relationship with any woman who cared about him then ended the book on the laughable note that he would be optimistically expecting to maintain his sobriety for his pet dogs because they’d “never seen him high”.

Anyway I don’t really know anything about him or the band but I was pretty invested in this Blood Sugar Sex Magic concept – it just had the kind of absurd and serious at the same time internal logic that was especially compelling to me and my practice at the time. Los Angeles, especially Hollywood, just felt charged with magic and symbolic power in a similar way to Washington DC and I was building a personal vocabulary within that framework.

The plan would have worked out easily, I’d been in a bit of a “dry spell” anyway, if I hadn’t gotten together and started living with my wife in November of that year. When I told her I would need to be giving up sex for Lent she was briefly receptive when she thought it was a solemn spiritual pursuit but once I let slip that it was part of an outsized meta-RHCP joke she shut the shit right down.

I don’t know if I picked a replacement thing to give up for Lent in 2013 but the gig was effectively up. I had already stopped going to Catholic Masses for everything except major holidays because the ritual had been losing its magic with me and effectively fizzling out. We went to an Eastern Orthodox Mass together in Culver City one night in a weird storefront because the officiant was oddly pushy and I did learn about hypostatic fusion but it just wasn’t the same.

I slowly started using prescription opiates again and it gradually grew into other stuff. We quit eating sugar together on a couple of occasions but I can’t remember if it was even a Lent thing. When we moved to New Orleans for half a year pills were impossible to come by and we got into heroin. We tried giving that up for Lent but it just didn’t stick.

I still feel a little wistful for my plan when I think about it now – I think my logic was sound but my timing was unfortunately off. At this point I’ve given up magic more or less organically – it’s drifted out of my life of its own accord and the last thing I’d ever want to do is force it. It may not be done with me yet – the future, as they say, is unwritten.

I have not been cutting strange women or drinking anybody’s blood. Sex and sugar, on the other hand, aren’t going anywhere.

I was talking to a friend recently who enjoyed his experiences with psychedelic drugs, primarily LSD, but made the decision to give them up entirely after two dangerous occurrences that easily could have been far worse or even ended his life. The first one happened in Chicago at the Museum of Science and Industry. There was a circus exhibit and he attempted to climb up the flying trapeze – ignoring or oblivious to the loud demands from staff members to desist.

While self harm had not been his intention he ended up involuntarily transported to a psychiatric hospital where he was put on a 24 hour suicide watch. At the beginning they put him in a literal straitjacket and he experienced the common paranoid delusion that his present state would last indefinitely:

“I just thought ‘this is my life now’ like the scene in the Eminem video: ‘I’m Slim Shady yes I’m the real Shady all the other Slim Shadys are just imitating”

Eventually, of course, the acid wore off and he was released with stern warnings from the nurses to clean up his act. After this he had many LSD trips that were relatively mellow and without incident. For a brief period of time it was basically his favorite drug.

The second incident happened approximately a year later when he was living in San Francisco. His apartment was on the seventh floor of a building and he became determined to jump out of the window – even going so far as breaking the actual glass. His girlfriend at the time and another one of our female friends, both tripping themselves, had to physically restrain him and babysit him for the rest of the night.

When the drug wore off a combination of the shame and guilt from what he’d put his friends through, the fact that this was happening for the second time and the knowledge that he could have easily died without outside intervention in either situation caused him to swear off drugs entirely. It seemed like a bad idea to keep tempting fate and discover if there was any truth in the expression “third time’s a charm”.

With the exception of caffeine and moderate amounts of alcohol he hasn’t touched another drug again but looks back fondly on his time with acid and credits the substance for “opening doors in his mind” and permanently informing the way in which he views the world.

This got me thinking of my own experiences and I realized I’ve never had one with a remotely plausible threat. I’ve had plenty of experiences while tripping that could have been disastrous if I hadn’t had my wits about me: talking to police, riding freight trains, jumping off a seventy foot high concrete pylon into the Mississippi River; but I was always in complete control in these cases and entirely without anxiety that anything might go wrong.

On the opposite end of the spectrum I’ve had multiple trips where nothing even slightly dangerous or worrisome was happening but I became entirely convinced that I had died and was experiencing the subsequent disintegration of my consciousness. This usually happens when I’m just sitting in my own house or going on a walk with friends. No external stimulus of any kind supports my morbid conclusion but my brain suddenly gains the ability to twist every piece of data into conclusive evidence of my demise regardless.

I become, until the concentration of psychotropic chemicals in my blood stream subsides, a sort of “Death Trip Savant”. In most cases this only happens the first time around with each particular drug: first LSD, first mushrooms, first 2CB. It also hadn’t happened for a long time, the last one being in 2009, and as I’d already tried nearly every available drug I figured that it would simply never happen again.

Then I went to a party in New Mexico earlier this Summer and found myself doing the same thing again with a drug I’ve had many experiences with and is usually considered to be only slightly psychedelic. This made me decide to write about all of these experiences – what they were like and what was going through my head.

The first one was in Chicago in 2001. It wasn’t technically my first time tripping on psychedelics, I’d been ingesting high doses of DXM and other over-the-counter dissociatives for the last year, but it was my first time using one that is generally thought of as recreational: LSD. Most people experiment with this one before moving on to harder stuff but I had been doing a gateway-drugs-to-heroin any% speedrun and hadn’t gotten around to it.

I had read some Young Adult “bad trip” literature, mostly SE Hinton’s That Was Then This Is Now, and heard the unconscionably terrible advice that it would “last the rest of my life” from the more experienced people around me. I’d also built up some serious bad karma: due to my perpetual sobriety some of my High School friends had asked me to “trip sit” and I’d showed up wearing a shirt, tie and three piece suit where each component was in a conflicting black and white pattern and spent the day constantly shifting my walking speed and doing other subtle things to cause my friends to question their experienced reality.

Regardless I didn’t go into my first LSD trip with any major anxieties or reservations but still managed to quickly find myself in a bad place.

We lived in an old house with a cramped staircase toward the back and after a few round trips between the first and second floors I found myself in a sort of crystallized time loop. To be clear the following description is not something I experienced visually, my friend Paul once remarked on how inadequate descriptions of visuals were for conveying the depth of experience within this kind of altered state, but rather something I observed within the architecture of the brain responsible for mapping out a model of the world around me and my own position in it.

If you’ve ever watched a video of somebody creating hand drawn animation and seen what it looks like when they layer several consecutive frames of movement this is how I perceived my own physical body but in a circular structure containing an entire journey over the stairs in both directions. If you find yourself confused by my explanation imagine something like the MC Escher piece at the beginning of this essay but with all the transitional positions filled in so the figures form a single continuous thread.

The whole thing was twisted into a kind of möbius strip – not the one you get by bending a two dimensional strip of paper but a structure formed by twisting a three dimensional figure into an invisible and imperceptible fourth dimension. It was also pulsing through all the colors of the spectrum of visible light. I’m asking a lot of your powers of imagination but I also need to reiterate that this was not something I thought I saw but rather something I thought I was.

We can talk about The Matrix, Plato’s Cave and the supposition that I might have been peeking under a veil at the actual reality of human existence but really I was just supremely fucked up on drugs.

In this moment my awareness of the passage of time was distorted to the point that I couldn’t say if this lasted a few moments or something closer to an hour but the really “bad” part didn’t kick in until immediately after it wore off. Because I’d temporarily lost the ability to discern between relative lengths of time I became convinced that I had been in this condition for several weeks instead of the course of a single night.

When I end up with this kind of conclusion I suddenly develop a form of self destructive psychic armor that protects the delusion against any contradictory evidence from either my own senses or the well intended reassurances of my friends. Whenever somebody tried to explain that I was only tripping and it had only been several hours I took it as a “white lie” designed to shield me from the seriousness of the actual situation.

I figured that nobody had had the heart to call my family or a hospital and all of my housemates had decided to just accept that I would be wandering the house and insanely rambling to myself from now on like an especially depressing piece of furniture. Because this was an episode where I’d assumed that I’d gone insane instead of literally dying I’d be tempted to not classify it as a “death trip” at all except for the fact that I did temporarily die at the end of it.

I had managed to return to my senses enough to wander into a wild party at the next door home of the landlord who was in the process of evicting us and even take some of his reassurances to heart. The next day I was still tripping but no longer having a bad time and Justin Two took me to a small carnival where I rode the Ferris Wheel, had a coconut Popsicle and watched a snail slowly eat a yellow dandelion flower.

After we returned to the house from all that I was getting tired from the sleepless night but still felt unusually alert and buzzy from the acid. I decided to shoot a bag of heroin to help me come down and relax. I still had lingering visual trails and some of the mental stuff but a lot less intense than how it had been. The first one didn’t feel like it had made a difference at all so I immediately cooked up and shot a second one.

I came to on the floor in front of the bathroom with my shirt soaking wet and a concerned circle of my housemates standing around me. I never learned if they had to inject me with nalaxone to revive me or if simply blasting me with cold water in the shower had been sufficient. Looking back at it now it seems really intense, overdosing on heroin while still tripping on acid 18 hours after dosing, but at the time it was just a single new experience nested within a progression of them where they were coming too fast to get caught up in reflection.

I never had another death trip from LSD no matter how much I eventually took. The next one happened the first time I ever ate psilocybin mushrooms. I had moved back to San Diego – it was late 2001, or some time in 2002 or possibly even an early part of 2003. There had been a show in an art space downtown and I followed a group of punk girls back to the empty house they were squatting near Golden Hills.

Even though it was already late I decided to eat my eighth of mushrooms on the walk to the squat. I don’t remember where I’d gotten them from.

It was nice enough inside the house – there weren’t any stinking piles of garbage or scary rooms you wouldn’t want to go in or anything like that. The only light came from a few candles and a flashlight or two and I neither had a cellphone nor did they have lights on them back then so I spent a little while wandering in the dark. At first it was nice: colorful geometric patterns were free to pulse through my field of vision without obstruction or interference from light or objects defined by the reflection of light.

I don’t remember how or when it started but the narrative was that I had been bitten by a brown recluse spider and died. The venom of this arachnid is almost never fatal, only known to be so in small children and takes many hours to kill rather than working instantly but none of that mattered. My brain had clamped its jaws onto the idea and like a pitbull or snapping turtle it was recalcitrant to release the pressure.

This next bit, with variations, became something of a repeating theme: I now thought that I had climbed into this house alone and the handful of punk girls surrounding me were merely personifications of the different parts of my psyche manifesting themselves as my lingering consciousness disintegrated in the wake of my body’s death. Looking in as an outsider after the fact it always amazes me that these convoluted narratives are able to take root while the much simpler explanation where the punk girls are actual punk girls and I am very much alive but tripping on drugs is somehow impossible to grasp.

This is my special skill and why I refer to myself as a Death Trip Savant. Occam’s Razor is rendered ineffectual for the duration of these episodes for the simple reason that no matter how much more complex the version of reality where I have died may be it is not a thing I suspect or fear – it is a thing I know.

I can’t remember if I even talked to the girls about what I was experiencing or mentioned that I’d taken mushrooms at all for that matter – certainly nobody else had taken any. After a certain amount of time I decided that I had to get out of the house and go for a walk. Some small part of me must have been looking for reassurance in the fact that the outside world continued to exist but mostly I thought that deliberately leaving the limbo in which I’d found myself would bring on either oblivion or afterlife.

I made my way to 26th Street and followed the twisting downhill course toward Pershing Drive and the back side of Balboa Park. Occasionally cars would drive past me and in the self-centering manner of someone who has lost control of the psychedelic narrative I thought they were hitting me despite the fact that I was walking on the edge of the road. It looked like they were throwing off sparks as they passed me – maybe one of them even was.

When I got around to the edge of the golf course I found a soccer ball and began to kick it in front of me as I walked. Once the road wrapped around the Navy Hospital and made it’s way uphill again I split away from it so that I might walk through the cactus garden. It was there that I found myself kicking around the soccer ball when the sun came up and I finally, in the face of overwhelming evidence, accepted that I was very much alive.

For a long time after this the only psychedelics I came across were ones I’d already tried, acid and mushrooms, and while I had moments of doubt or panic I never again succumbed to a full on death trip. In late 2007 and much of 2008 I took LSD a lot, occasionally buying entire sheets and selling it, and got used to doing the reckless things I talked about it in an earlier paragraph. There’s no time to worry that you might have died when climbing onto roofs and running and jumping and a single slip or distraction could make it all too real.

In the Summer of 2009 I flew out to Berlin for a collaborative art project that Lisers from the Rockaway had organized called Fever of Unknown Origin. One night I was running around with Drew, Alexis and Popsicle when somebody passed around doses of a new chemical that was making waves called 2C-B. Theoretically the night’s mission was to seek out the leather bar that Rob Halford had opened in his name and likeness but as our navigation skills became ineffectual this was abandoned in favor of general running around on drugs.

There’s a lot of this night I don’t remember. I have some fragmentary recollections of a starry eyed girl glimpsing us through a window and chasing after us to ask “which culture” we were from in German. The only answer I was willing to offer was koboldskultur or “the culture of goblins” no matter how many times she protested and insisted such a thing didn’t exist.

Like most of my nights in Berlin I was wearing a rubber witch nose on an elastic band.

We were outside of some old East Berlin apartment blocks when I began to fall into my now familiar loop. Perhaps it was partially brought on by a feeling of guilt because I had taken an unlocked bike from outside a similar structure my first night in town – reasoning that if the last person to use it hadn’t even bothered to secure it they were most likely not too concerned with keeping it. I don’t think I even bothered with an invented cause of death this time around but my friends had once again been recast as figments of my own awareness as it flickered out of existence.

By this time I had seen movies like the 1990 Jacob’s Ladder where the central conceit was similar to this recurring delusion and under this influence I had moments where I viewed my companions as tormenting visions as well.

It’s hard to say definitively what was real and what was only paranoid hallucination. The bit of playground equipment that we sat around as my friends waited for me to recover from my morbid obsession was almost certainly real. Drew may not have begun swinging while standing up but he easily could have. When I saw his face explode with gore over and over like he’d been in a high speed traffic collision that only could have been a product of my troubled mind.

I must have latched onto the car crash concept because after this I started laying down under parked vehicles on the cobblestone roads and refusing to move. Talking about this later Drew complained that I always seemed to pick the most boring section of any block to do this. While my friends gave it an earnest try the thing that snapped me back to reality was the moment two English girls came running up to us and screamed:

“Michael Jackson is dead!”

Suddenly I realized that I wasn’t dead at all – Michael Jackson was. What I had interpreted as my own death must have been a psychic intuition of the demise of the King of Pop. To continue with the established pattern I went on to take 2C-B a handful of other times without a single death delusion.

My single Salvia trip is already documented in The Problem of the Burzum Shirt but I wanted to quickly touch on its salient points for reasons that should soon become apparent. I wouldn’t describe the experience as a death trip – rather it was an instinctual recoiling from three intolerable realities: those of being a thief, rapist or murderer. This added elements of guilt, sin and damnation to the death trip lexicon.

Nonetheless I had every reason to believe my death trip days were behind me. I had gone through initial experiences with both DMT and Fly Agaric mushrooms without triggering one, I had heard too many horror stories to ever take Datura and while I’d probably take PCP at least once it never seemed to be around. I wasn’t too interested in messing with the alphabet soup of RC psychedelics and didn’t seem to be moving in the right circles for them anyway.

My entire theory of “first time only” went right out the window when my most recent death trip was triggered by something I had plenty of experience with: ketamine. While my first excursion with this substance was notable it wasn’t for the usual reasons. One night in San Diego I was waiting for my bus in front of the Chee-Chee Club when someone asked me I wanted to come do some in his flophouse room on K Street.

After making it abundantly clear that this wouldn’t be a hookup I decided to take him up on the offer. This was right before Petco Park was built and the East side of downtown was still filled with sleazy rooming houses. The best way I can describe the effects of using ketamine for the first time is that it made me feel like there were no flat surfaces in the world and everything was slanted.

As ridiculous as that sounds the illusion was incredibly powerful – I tried to set a half full can of beer down on top of the TV but found myself afraid to release my hand from it because it genuinely felt like it would slide off and spill on the carpet.

Once I got a little more acclimated my host began to tell me his story. He’d embezzled a decent chunk of money from an office job he hated then got caught and served a short jail sentence. He’d managed to squirrel away the funds where investigators couldn’t touch it and was now living off his ill gotten gains. It had caused every person he cared about in his life to shun him however – it was hard to say whether this trade off had been actually worth it or not.

It was clear that he was so desperate for any kind of companionship that he wouldn’t risk pushing my boundaries but regardless I couldn’t hang out and do drugs all night. I needed to get sleep, fresh clothes and a shower in the morning for my job at an Elementary School. Luckily there was just enough time to catch the last bus back to my parents house.

He had also offered me GHB but I wasn’t about to touch that can of worms.

It’s been a handful of years since I’ve encountered any drugs besides my prescribed Suboxone and small amounts of alcohol but I decided to go to New Mexico for a party my friends put on called Blog Cabin Reunion. I’ve basically been leading a hermit’s existence on a mountain with my wife and our pets so the craziest drug for me was just being in social party mode again but there were plenty of actual drugs as well. My friends who host it had quit drinking alcohol recently and so-called “party drugs” were picking up the slack.

In a week of hanging out I took LSD, mushrooms, a little MDMA and even smoked some DMT but in between all of these was a steady diet of ketamine. Most of this had been relatively mild but on my last night before heading back to California I went a little too hard on that last one. This wasn’t the first time I’ve even ended up in a k-hole but it was the first time that the k-hole dumped me directly into a psychedelic death trip.

All of my prior episodes had seemed to take place independently of environmental stimuli but this time around the surrounding circumstances almost certainly played a role. I was already feeling out of it when Dain launched into an activity called “noise-aoke” : partygoers took turns picking tracks from his record collection to sing over and a couple of effects pedals on the mic and plenty of knob twisting kept things sounding consistently bugged out.

The thing that pushed me over the edge however was the sudden appearance of a giant crate full of muppets.

Of course there was a perfectly rational explanation: somebody had donated a bunch of muppets to a local Thrift Store and my friends had bought them but saved them for the moment at the party where they’d have the biggest impact. In fact I’ve got a muppet too that I found in a free pile at a local yard sale and even briefly considered bringing it to the party with me.

With a head full of drugs the shadow nemesis that seems to live inside my brain reached for a less-than-rational explanation which should be easy enough to guess at this point : obviously some forgotten mishap had resulted in my death and the sudden appearance and distribution of muppets was merely a metaphorical contrivance borne from deep within my fading subconscious.

It really is amazing that no matter how incongruent each new piece of evidence may feel the death trip savant can effortlessly incorporate the entire patchwork into its paranoid narrative. I imagine this is close to what it feels like to have a psychotic break or be hopelessly susceptible to conspiracy theories. If my comparison is correct there really is no amount of contradictory proof that can bring these people back from their deranged paradigms.

Like everybody else in the room I’d been holding a muppet and pretending to make it talk. The floppy puppet felt oddly flaccid in my hands and the contours of its head was reminiscent of a certain familiar shape. I somehow interpreted all of this to mean that I had lost control, cut off my penis and subsequently bled to death. I once read an account of somebody who had cut his tongue and penis off with garden shears while tripping on datura – the main reason I’m terrified of ever trying this particular entheogen.

While all of this was going on I performed a rendition of Bobby Darin’s Mack the Knife then folded this back into my churning thoughts as additional clues that the grisly end I was imagining had definitely transpired. Even though I was an IV drug user the sight or even thought of blood is capable of making me lightheaded and I soon became too nauseous to stand and collapsed into a seated position in the middle of the floor.

My friends started giving me concerned looks because I was off my head and behaving erratically. Obviously they were only mental projections of my friends and their expressions were due to the fact that I’d just died a grisly death by my own hand in the middle of the party. To add to the general feeling of unreality the crate of muppets seemed to be bottomless – no matter how many had been passed around there always seemed to be at least one more.

I was sitting next to Rachel as she peered in and told me that only one was left. I watched as she pulled it out to where I could see it. The thing looked distinctly sinister – it snakelike body was covered in coarse black hair. Everything was a sign. Everything was a symbol.

I let go of the severed penis theory and just started rapidly mentally flipping between theoretical worst case scenarios. The ketamine had been laced with a powerful fentanyl analogue, I’d been bitten by a rattlesnake, somebody had murdered me, I had murdered somebody else, someone was in the process of raping me, I had raped someone else…

None of these narratives conjured accompanying mental images. The gallery of horrors I was subjecting myself to was purely in the abstract realm of ideas. I was in some version of hell being punished for crimes that I couldn’t even remember. This didn’t go on for too terribly long – probably three or four songs as the “noise-aoke” session continued unabated around me.

Finally I decided to stand up and walk outside as a kind of experiment. The drugs must have started wearing off or something else had changed because when I looked into the night sky at the moon and stars I took this as evidence that I was still alive instead of twisting it into some convoluted evidence that I wasn’t. I saw some people I didn’t recognize sitting at an outside table and I sat down and started telling stories…

I don’t think I will give up taking psychedelic drugs entirely but I do feel a little embarrassed that I lost control to the death trip again. Not that there’s anything specific to be embarrassed about – as catastrophic as these experiences are in the moment in my head they are essentially “nonevents” to any outside observer. I think my embarrassment is almost athletic in nature.

When I went through my acidhead phase I used to do things like perform dark magical curses as songs, drink people’s blood and sit in a corner burning hair while imagining the sounds of breaking glass and screaming. I used to pride myself on my ability to talk to cops while tripping and maintain psychic dominance in the situation instead of being intimidated or giving in to anxieties. That makes me feel like if I handled that I should be able to handle these situations where nothing potentially threatening is happening at all.

I don’t think I understand the part of my brain that takes over in these moments at all. I don’t really get where it comes from, what it’s for or why I’m so incapable of resisting it. The one thing I do know is that it’s very good at what it does.

It is… the Death Trip Savant.