ok seriously how have i not seen this until now? it’s so good

Last night I took two mescaline capsules, which my friend Steph had given to me before I left San Francisco. Apparently she just bought them legally from some sort of health / supplement store. There’s also a little bit of psilocybin in them, maybe 20%, the other 80% being mescaline . . . an Arnold Palmer of natural hallucinogens. So it’s crushed cactus and mushrooms ground into a green dust and put inside clear vegetable capsules.

I have been looking for mescaline for over a decade. I lived in Texas and California, Cactus Country more or less, and even still it eluded me. It’s just not as popular as LSD or mushrooms, probably because you just can’t get a hold of the stuff. Actual peyote cactus takes like thirty years to grow, but what I got comes from San Pedro cactus, which germinates and yields mescaline buttons much quicker. And now finally I had gotten my hands on the stuff. I would have preferred to eat the buttons whole, though I’ll tell you what, at this point in my life I’ll take what I what I can get, whatever it is . . .

And so it was that on the evening of April 6th, 2024 A.D., I ingested two capsules in the purple gloom my apartment. I washed them down with a cup of black coffee and thought: “Well baby, then aloha.” I sat at my desk and wrote some, and texted my friends, and on and on, while listening to chill music, waiting for the slow come-up, which is always one of the most exciting parts when eating any hallucinogen. It didn’t hit me that I was neck-deep in a dreamlike state till I stepped out onto my street an hour later to take my trash out. To me the high is immediately amplified or made obvious, whether it’s weed or mushrooms, because suddenly you’re in public and in view of other people. I stood there on the sidewalk watching the rainbow halo of irridescence now surrounding the street lights, and inside the apartments across the street, made all the brighter because of the peyote furnace raging inside me. It was a warm night and nearby people were sitting outside of little cafes and walking their dogs. My pupils were big empty zeroes and I felt like a cartoon character just then. I turned around and ran up four flights of stairs to get back to the coziness of my apartment. My stomach had that strange feeling and my fingertips felt cold, so I knew I was dipping my toe in Wacky World. I put on music and went into the kitchen to make green tea.

I’m not going to sit here and describe what a drug feels like other than to say that I felt euphoric and happy and talkative and my body felt warm and rubbery. This was just an EXPLORATORY trip, a trial run, and so I can’t say for sure what happens when you crank the dial and go full-blown cactus crazy. I figure I’ll save that for a long walk on for some weekend in May when it’s 70 degrees at night. But for now I stayed home and ate fruit and drank a gallon of water and called Laura. I played that new Zelda and was totally relaxed just flying around in the sky. At 5 am I put on BOB LE FLAMBEUR and hung out with it till the credits rolled. I had seen Roger Ebert recommend it in one of his reviews. It’s considered the first French New Wave film, and the grandfather of all heist movies. Man! I had a really good time watching that movie.

Bob is a washed up middle-aged up gambler who rolls dice and plays cards in little bars and clubs with his friends till six in the morning. He looks like a noir detective in a hat and a crumpled overcoat and a five o’clock shadow, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. Then he takes off his jacket and hat and drives home wearing his nice suit and in his nice car to get back to his beautiful apartment. He sleeps till the afternoon and wakes up to black coffee left by his maid. Once the sun goes down, Bob slicks back his hair and returns to the Parisian red light district to try his luck yet another night. Bob’s friends tend to be younger, and he has a sort of fatherly / mentor relationship with them. Later, Bob concocts the ultimate heist to pull off with his crew. Basically, Bob is cool as hell.

When the movie ended, I saw that the sun had come up behind the sheets hung over my windows, and I reckoned it was time to dream the dreams of the cactus. I brushed my teeth and got into bed and fell asleep immediately. I slept for seven hours and woke in the afternoon. I had no pain in my body whatsoever . . . it felt as though I was flooded with endorphins. I didn’t want to get out of bed, but when I checked the weather, seeing that it was 73 degrees outside, I knew I had to get up and SOAK UP as much of it as I could. So I popped open the tops of all my windows to let the air in and made coffee and sat outside on my balcony overlooking a forested place where little red squirrels with pointy ears live.

Well: Mescaline is great. I had what you might call a WHOLLY POSITIVE EXPERIENCE (WPE). So take that for whatever it’s worth. I’ll keep you ABREAST on my next go around, when I take a mid-level dose . . . or maybe I’ll do a hero’s dose and just dive head-first into the abyss. Why not? I’m not afraid. I already got some idea of what’s down there. And anyway, perhaps instead of plunging into darkness, a mescaline trip of that magnitude is more of an ascension. It’s got to be, and isn’t that nicer to think about? Either way, I will manifest it. I mean, Aldous Huxley wrote a whole book about eating that stuff, and getting real jazzed on it, and look how he turned out. Who’s to say I don’t come out the other side with the seed planted in me to someday grow older to become a Bob The Gambler type of dude. Bob is free and has a lot of friends and is the architect of his own destiny. I can think of worse fates.

Sometimes I post music on here, and then a stranger will email me and say they thought it was cool. Here’s another one. I remember when this came out . . . I was living in Austin at the time. Anyway, it rules. OK??

i’m always saying this to girls……………..

damn . . . THE DEVILS is extremely good. i was blown away by it. i love ken russell. i feel like even his worst movies are still interesting and special in some way, but this is one of the best he ever made. that and oliver reed is incredible it. lord!

IN THE STARRY GLOOM OF THE HIGH CASTLE IN WHICH I DWELL

. . . I lie on my back on my couch facing away from the windows, obscured by sheets and towels, on account of my not having gotten around to hanging black-out curtains. The sun is rising and I’m awake for it once again, which is a miserable feeling. I really ought to fix my sleep schedule, but I can’t break the spell! Anytime I try to sedate myself with Trazodone, I end up way oversleeping, what with that stuff being extremely potent. With a full pill you could put a clydesdale in a coma. As for me, I take what is essentially a crumb and I’m knocked off my ass for 14 hours. I’ve got plenty of time anymore now that my life has been stripped of all meaning, but I wasn’t exactly trying to spend it all in Nightmare Land, which is where I go whether I sleep naturally or artificially.

Yesterday I woke up and my pillow was soaked and I had tears streaming down my face. I had been crying in my dream and was crying in real life too. I’m sure you can guess why. What does it mean when someone has nightmares every single night of their life? I can’t ever get out from under them. I wake up completely shattered. I spend the next few hours with one foot still in the nightmare until I am as sure as I’ll ever be that I have fully awoken . . . and even then, who really knows, and what’s the difference anyway? I serve no purpose to myself nor anyone else in my waking life. I already told you what my big problem is, which is that I have found myself on the other side of the border once again, if you catch my meaning. Up here in the tower, I live like Count Dracula. I’m not really alive. Rather, I feel as though I’m just pitifully pantomiming my life, emptied of all meaning by years of repetition. I am watching myself on television.

. . . The woman he had loved most (he was thirty at the time) would tell him (he was nearly in despair when he heard it) that she held on to life by a thread. Yes, she did want to live, life gave her great joy, but she also knew that her “I want to live” was spun from the threads of a spiderweb. It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything—love, convictions, faith, history—no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides in the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter.

Yes.

. . . and as my friend Philip K. Dick wrote in VALIS:

Who am I? How many people am I? Where am I? This plastic little apartment in southern California is not my home, but now I am awake, I guess, and here I live, with my TV, and my stereo and my books . . . In comparison to my life in the inter-connected dreams, this life is lonely and phony and worthless . . . Where are the roses? Where is the lake? Where is the slim, smiling, attractive woman coiling and tugging the green garden hose? The person that I am now, compared with the person in the dream, has been baffled and defeated and only supposes he enjoys a full life. In the dreams, I see what a full life really consists of, and it is not what I really have.

Yes.

And see, I thought I knew the depths of myself, and how deep I could go. I thought I had been to the deepest layer, and had got out again. I was mistaken. I am experiencing despair in ways I had not thought was possible for me, which is saying something. I completely understand now how a perfectly normal person can wake up one day and drive a tractor-trailer off a cliff, or whatever. I get it. Whatever feeble mechanisms of self-preservation were in place before, the ones that have kept me around for 36 years, they have vanished. I don’t have a death wish but I also don’t care. I’ve said as much before. It’s like dark matter inside my brain, a sort of inexorable truth that I can’t shake, and which permeates everything I do. It is the filter through which everything passes. Nothing gets around it. No light can escape! You should care about your life and what happens to you. It is almost repulsive to me that I cannot care about myself . . . because I desperately want to care! I don’t know what it means when you want to and yet you can’t make yourself do it. I guess as usual I am my own experiment. Wait and see!

Once again I feel the heat of the sun warming my apartment through the sheets I have hung up, and I hear birds in the trees outside my window. This fills me with dread when it ought to do the opposite. Ahab says something melodramatic about how light and all loveliness is anguish to him since he can never enjoy it anymore, and that the path to his fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon his soul is grooved to run, by which he means his final act of self-destruction. Yeah. Well, time to dwell on my own fixed purpose from within the landless latitude of my nightmares. I’d bet money that’s where I’m headed in a few minutes, though I’ll tell you what, I’d give just about anything to be wrong.

lol

I want to write more about this later, and at length, but I was just standing alone in my kitchen at 5 am drinking tea and eating fruit and listening to music like a real loser, and I felt this absolute dread that I’m afraid nothing is really all that fun anymore. I spent six months traveling around, and I had a good time most of the time, but now that I am back in my own apartment actually sleeping in a bed again, and being truly alone if I want to, I realize that the tens of thousands of miles I endured there and back again have not left me with as much as I thought it would. There is still some crucial element missing that I can’t exactly place and it is a sadness to me.

It’s like the fella said: Look me in the eye and tell me I’m satisfied. Well, I ain’t!

And see: I have done such things in the past. I have spent entire years of my life floating around, having weird bad-interesting experiences, seeing old friends and new freaks, and on and on, and I remember it being more fulfilling. Maybe it’s just that it feels played out now in some sense, since I’ve done it so many times. Such is my tale. Still: What did it become this time? I passed some time and got what I could get out of it. I reckon that’s the best you can hope for sometimes.

I know when the fun stopped. There is a sort of curse on me that I think about it every day whether I want to or not. It’s a ghost story on repeat in my mind, is what it is. It ended November 2019, and never came back. I told Monty earlier that I often think about one of the last times I was in Portland at the same time as her, just before she moved, which was April 2019. I was in town to see her and Molly and The Pink-Haired girl, who I was in love with at the time. It was the first time I ever met her and everything. And somewhere in the middle of all this, Monty and I had this essentially perfect day. It was 4/20, so we went to a dispensary and bought some gummies, and then got ripped out of our skulls and walked for many miles through SE Portland, which is where I used to live, laughing like psycho idiots. We even went to Tom’s and had coffee, which is what we used to do every Sunday. Eventually we ended up at Laurelhurst Park and did cartwheels in the grass. Everyone was sitting on blankets and talking. And across the way from us, an old dude in denim and a cowboy hat was sitting on a picnic table in the shade playing ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ for everyone. We lay in the grass stoned off our asses and transfixed listening to him play. Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, but it was a beautiful day in the spring and nothing was wrong. It was, god help me, A Fun Day.

Next day I went to an amusement park and a rollerskating rink with The Pink-Haired Girl, but I’ve written about that before . . .

And when I went home two days later, Dante was waiting for me:

What is my life now? Five years and nearly six-thousand miles away from all that, I guess my life is being alone and eating fruit in my kitchen an hour before the sun rises, which it is now, so I really ought to stop writing this and hide before it’s too late. Whenever you stay awake so long you can hear the birds outside, you’re in big trouble, and I’m in big trouble. But I want to write about that house I lived in back then and all those people who came around, and how that was The Last Good Year, even if it is painful.

Yeah, well . . . so long for now~ ☆彡

please use this in my obituary . . . or like if the media needs a file photo in the event that i rob a bank and/or go missing

hell yeah lol

RED ROCK WEST rules by the way

i’m posting a huge thing i wrote tomorrow

i finally finished it . . .