Smoke Rings of Time

This post is a sequel to my (arguably better) recent post “My Psychedelic Experiences“. This is a republish, although this time I decided to start with the journal entries and end with the “poetry”.

When reading my “poetry” – bear in mind that I was between the ages of 21-24, and was high for 18 hours a day on strong Alaskan Thunderfuck weed.

Some of my attempts at poetry approached something almost good, while others are comical. Ex. “circles dancing on the road to fear” – like – wtf? Haha. It is pretty clear that I was a big fan of Jim Morrison and The Doors. Like many young rock n’ roll women.

I often wish I had written more journal entries from this time period. Unfortunately, I was often just way too stoned for something as organized as journaling. Seeing Ani DiFranco in concert pushed me over the edge…. to the point where I was so damn inspired that I just couldn’t help but journal about the event soon after. And then, of course, something that destroyed my world happened later on – and I had no choice but to write about it.

*

March 2004

Ani DiFranco performed Saturday night, downtown at the Atwood Concert Hall.  Kat and I passed around the side of the building to the front entrance.  As we turned the corner, it was Wyatt I first recognized – leaning against one of the pillars, guitar flashing as he strummed. 

He was surrounded by a group of kids I soon recognized as my friends.  I laughed, seeing them before they saw me.  I approached, watching them immersed in their dream together and existing in the space of each other.

Jake was singing and playing.  Wyatt accompanied him on rhythm with a sly smile.  Nick stood, Eddie sat on a skateboard.  Crystal sat cross legged on the cement. 

Their faces broke into smiles as they heard my laughter and saw me.

I was laughing because on Friday night I had suggested that we go down to the street and play for change.  Jake had said yes, we should play for the crowd outside Ani’s show.  And here they were.

Wyatt wore his green robe with some kind of Egyptian looking design on the cuffs and edges.  He looked like Dylan in Greenwich Village, which he would have thought a flattering observation if I had actually said anything.

Jake said his fingers were cold, but he kept playing anyway.  A bum came over, stumbled over drunken words, and then pulled out a harmonica and played a solo for us.  We stood watching awkwardly, glancing around at one another with smirks.  After the bum finished playing, he wandered off and said we could find him a couple of streets over.

We went inside and they announced the show was beginning.  When Ani began playing, the moment came alive beneath the stage lights.  She poured manic acoustic soul-energy onto our heads as she sweated out images through poetry and rhythm.

After the show, we all went to Jake’s apartment for some drinking.  Wyatt used his beer bottle as a guitar slide.  After a while Jake suggested we walk over to Wyatt’s house to listen to a new recording of Crystal reading poetry over circuit-bending sound effects.

I noticed everything on the walk.  A parade of sensation danced before me; the tall streetlights bathed the street orange.  As usual, I made some remark about the beauty of the moment.  As usual, Jake and Wyatt both called me a hippie.

*

Wyatt’s room is an incredible escape.  For the past few years, Wyatt’s place has been the place to go for green, good company, and the constant flow of never-before-heard music. 

In this room, we listened to Crystal read poetry, and also Wyatt and Jake’s band recordings, The Crooked Toys.   Sitting on the bed, the bookshelf was five feet in front of me.  It was full of vinyl records and subculture novels written by guys like Burroughs and Kerouac.  The top used to be filled with empty Southern Comfort bottles.  Each one stood like a memory in a cloud. An evening in which fun was poured out of the bottle like a hazy genie.

On this particular night, in post-concert excitement, the conversation played out as though we were in a documentary.  Jake brought up an observation or a memory.  He talked about summer 2001; the summer when I first met them.  Back then they were loud, music-playing mohawked punkers living next to me – a never ending stream of rowdy energy.  They were up all hours of the night partying.  First they annoyed me, but soon I became intrigued by them. 

Jake reminisced about the wildness of that summer.  He would pause in a story-telling kind of way, and Wyatt would deliver a thought or memory in his quiet voice; measured, on the verge of something new. I never remember every single detail because we’re always stoned in Wyatt’s room.  I stared down at our shoes as I listened.  The carpet appeared to be 10 feet below.

November 2005

I’ve wanted to dive into my memories for some time now and write about them.  I wanted to tell the story of the crowd and write about the last few years.  I never got around to it. 

But I never wanted to write about this.  I never could have anticipated this.  Wyatt killed himself on the 5^th of November.  Nick called me Sunday and broke the news.  To use Jake’s word, it was “surreal”. 

Shock penetrated every fiber of my being, as it did for everyone.  Nick’s voice broke into sobs as he told me. I had to call him back because my throat ached so much that I couldn’t talk.  He called back later and I told him I was coming over.

Nate and Ida came over to Adam’s house to join us that night.  Nobody directly talked about Wyatt, although it hung over the room unmistakably, a dark cloud.  It was awkward at times; the undercurrent of shock and sadness was so thick.   But on the surface, it wasn’t doom and gloom the entire time.  There was subtle laughter over a pool game and Nick’s cats. 

Ida made strong white Russians for everyone.  Too strong.  The night ended in a sick haze of throwing up outside where the frozen air felt relieving on my skin. I stood with my arm against the wall, glancing up at the moon, thinking about how Wyatt had stood where I was standing.  I crashed on Adam’s couch and woke up in the cold sunlight.

Driving the streets of Anchorage, all I could think this whole week is he’s not here.  It goes around in my head like a mantra. 

Everything is colorless, white noise vibrations like the feeling of being at work on a Monday morning when you are sleep deprived.   Almost every night I’ve woken at 5:00 in the morning, thinking of him, having memories of all the interactions we’ve ever had.  Remembering things, he said to me, said to others.

Work was awful.  I made the mistake of showing up Monday.  I had known Wyatt before I knew any of these people.  There was a time a couple years ago when all I had in my day-to-day life was them… the kids, the artists, the lovers of visual art, of poetry, of reading, and above all music.

Wyatt was a uniquely important part of this scene, a huge part of that flow and now I see more than ever how he brought his influence to everyone. 

Last night Wanda mentioned a few bands she would never have appreciated, if it wasn’t for him.  Bob Dylan, Modest Mouse, Radiohead, to name a few. 

Kat has a hand-drum sitting in her room.  She sought it after Wyatt brought back a similar drum from India.  A couple weeks ago I was thinking of getting a harmonica.  Wyatt and his harmonica.  Last spring, I wrote that I wished I could invade his book stash. 

“Incredible” – that was Wyatt’s word, a word he used to describe things he loved.  Wyatt was beautiful. Apparently, he was extremely unhappy sometimes.  Despairing as all of us were and are sometimes.

He was always mellow, and now I realize his mellow nature was a deeper sadness.  It goes without saying that all of us wish he would have seen things through that night so he could have had the opportunity to feel inspired again in this up and down roller coaster maze that is existence.

*

Undated

Euphoria madness, gates to openness

Rising falling reeling in time

Sneaky shadows cross the sunrise

Sadness darkens the path to your mind

Circles dancing on the road to fear

Leaving judgement to the blind

Triangular moods fade in the distant sky

And then appear next to you

Sometime in 2003

Everything is interesting on this drug.  Memories are interesting.  Music is beautiful, but then it always is.  There are few things like the feeling of chills that you normally get when you love a specific song, combined with LSD.  My Bloody Valentine, Jefferson Airplane, Radiohead.  Where did this come from, and why does it make so much sense!? Matter and chemical. We are nothing.

heh heh heh heh. The one time I wrote while on LSD. Yes. So very insightful. heh. We are nothing, people.

Undated

Throw back the door

We lie in wait here

Marveling at the bottom of infinite possibility

Glancing upward toward a feast of language unwritten

Locked in the cell of our cells

And the guardsman say to Stay Put

The one standing at the entrance

Throws imagination at them

Like stones piercing through the night sky to the target

Of those who would block the glorious exit

Deliver the allies into enchanted places

Seen and unseen

New strange sweet open

Exerted expounded existing

heh heh heh. Nevermind my terrible fucking handwriting. It’s generally a bit better when I’m not high as fuck.

Spring 2000

If I could have illustrated it, I would have drawn the music in physical form, drifting from his instrument into my body. And the lighting would be an extension of the sound and emotion.  Several times I felt my eyes becoming moist.  If the true audience are those listening, I was the only audience.  Only a few other people sat in the old coffee house, they were scattered and involved in their conversations.

(I am so glad I wrote about this – it was a solo guitarist doing a lot of Cat Stevens covers in a little coffeehouse in Wasilla, Alaska. Due to my choice to write, I can remember this incredible musician like it was yesterday. I was about 20 years of age at this time. I sat facing this acoustic guitarist and behind him were the most intricate and beautiful stained glass hangings against the huge windows, the best stained glass art that you can possibly imagine. This is a lesson about how you MUST write about experiences in order to remember them.)

Undated

Outside the window, staring at the ground, I hear it.  A shimmering echo of ascending and descending busyness.  It travels in a solitary way outside the limits of human understanding.  Before hearing this well-crafted magnificence, I wanted to wander to the edge of my world and jump off into the black.  Then suddenly I heard it. Combined with caffeine, it enchanted the colors right back and it deepened the hues, and it opened up the drive to create.

Undated

Momentum

The moment lies trapped

Inside the cruel

Unrelenting fist of time

You must peel the moment from time’s grip

Cast all doubt aside

For time is a universal illusion

Only distance is real

And distance doesn’t end

Undated

We put candles out to mask the other side

They wouldn’t know couldn’t know

Don’t step through the shields

And so, the scent flows

Vanilla, rose and the candles burn

Thru the haze that crows the space and reluctantly

Reaches toward the window

Eager to stay

And dance around the flames

Absorbing a new consciousness into fractured minds

Suffocated by too many dealings

In a world of thousands of universes

From their lost sea of ideal visions

But the sea roars on

And cannot be held back by futile barriers

Or hopes of retreat

It waits to break and roll back

Leaving beneath it a smooth new surface

Upon which minds bask, dance and receive

Masked activities are windows to the sea

And the candles burn on

Undated

Unharnessed illusion of a heightened perception circus

The ringmaster grins

He watches the walls and stairs breathing alive

As though

His eyeballs have been turned around in his head

So that they look upon his brain

And the strobe light flickering

Trance of neurons going haywire

Fields of red and blue explode randomly

Is the door raining drops of paint?

Of course not

The ringmaster reasons

But then

If he can see it rain

And watch it do nothing

In what he thought was reality

What is it really doing between the two opposites?

Perhaps there’s even more happening

Undated

Sweet haunting love

Chasing invisible muse, never catching

Elusive and beautiful

Eternal and mysterious

Everywhere

Undated

Where do the voices come from? 

A thought asked

But was met with only silence

And the dark that soon gives way to dawn

Until we meet the light

The candle of her voice

Will refresh our souls and bodies

Winter 2001

It’s been too long since this invisible ghost has unleashed the tidal wave of uninhibited thoughts freely. Still, something is lost between innermost articulation and the stage that is paper.  Wandering, wandering, wandering.  Wandering through the black. There is no tomorrow and hardly any yesterday in times like this.  Only the forward momentum of now.  A stared into space filled with shapes, but a transcendent stare that moves steadily beyond it all.  Craving a deep breath of release.

Stepping forward on a slippery stone and claiming a new voice unheard to vacant ears.  Spinning, spinning, spinning.  Fireworks streak down and fade in her mind.  Unknown places that she might never go, but in solitude and half in the ground beneath the stars and trees, she builds a bridge of images. They call subtly from the distance when she’s buried in the squares and circles, far away, wound up all the way and clicking fast like a wind-up toy operated at the hands of another. 

Traffic jerking, splashing puddles, city buildings grey and humming.  The bridge calls out from the distance, layered with a translucent silvery charm, stretched comfortably across her mind like skin across a hand-made drum.  Where does it go?

To oaks and willows swaying gently.  To a sidewalk at dusk a child sees the blinking lights of what he calls a spaceship.  He needs nothing more than his imagination and physical surroundings to lift him into the realm lying between. 

The bridge travels on to a concert where the vulnerable empowered sway together.  A few thousand or more separate universes unified, even with their divisions of countless complications, united into a common sound that somehow uncorks every individual. The bridge fades away, silhouette falling away with the disappearance of light.  Back to the squares and circles.

Undated

At home again, looking up at the power lines.  The sounds carry up to the cables and sing to ring forever from there.

Undated

Water and bread never got them thru

They carried a flag

For otherworldly consciousness

While the hermits of materialism stashed their goods and held fast

For something they didn’t know

“It’s all about reactions,” she said, “and how groups of earthly beings

In reality react to the nothingness they want to be somethingness”

Undated

Welcome to the haze

Come inside the maze

Brush strokes and patterns

Of words and intervals

Numbers

It’s all language

But

There’s no way out because

It shifts in cycles

So that

You hit a wall

When you believe you’ve hit the exit

Or the entrance to a new place in space

Where you want to be

So you linger on the path

Content to make the travel

Because you think you see

The closure just up ahead

Around the corner and beside the

Neon glowing scene

Of your dream

And then it shifts and you scream

Was a lie and you cry

But here comes the next optimistic bend

And you’re at it all again

Undated

Lie cry die

Keep it all inside

Fight lost try

Losing losing losing

Time

Work struggle lie

To gather a dime

Hide hide

Break slowly

You’re on the wrong side of life

Winter 2004

(Grace Slick Girl-Boner prose)

Blue green eyes, the color of ice and azure

pierce into you

She grips the microphone in her hand

She wears a dark towel with a belt wrapped around her waist

She sings so loudly, so passionately that the veins in her neck rise

As the muscles strain

Her hair is dark and long

Her voice is deep and low

Contralto

Winter 2004

A long time ago, jake sat in his living room leaning over the cd book, flipping through it and trying to decide what to listen to.  Someone suggested The Velvet Underground.  He said he didn’t like the because they didn’t give him “that rush”.  I remember being intrigued and amused.  Because I knew exactly what he was talking about.  We all did.

Winter 2004

In a long slow dream, you thought you had immeasurable time and distance.  It was illusion.  It was the bending mirrors of a wishing pond.  It was your swan gently gliding on golden conscious.  It was images sketched in silvery hope and intertwined with a tunnel made of iron sound and whispered resolve.  Cynicism descended like a poisoned waterfall drowning the universe.  The curtains fell slowly and the darkness is still blinding.  Now is the time again to reignite the fires, burn passion with the light long into the eve.  Energy creates energy.  Acceptance of their reality is the conspiracy of lost flight.  Leave the hollow gutless growths in their lifeless forests.  Rise instead to the shimmering echoes of the moment where genius awaits.

Spring 06, Fridge Magnet Poetry

Spring full wander

Evening black wild

Autumn Mushroom

Early morning breath

Yellow dandelion dream

Stream, harvest grass

In my blue winter thought

Summer dawn road

Must be here

Garden life thru roof

While I leave

Almost journey

Between sound

Rain Child Field

Watch this cold shore

We live

Laugh Shiver Cry

Drop Fall Stand Cry

Thereafter listen

Why

*thanks for reading

Have you ever been experienced? Well, I have. Mmm, LSD. Elementary as these little drawings may be, don’t dare think for a moment that I could draw even that much without a push from LSD.

This was written on the back of the psychedelic spider-angel-bong thing. Too lazy to type it up at this point.

“Take me back to the caverns, crystal light and reflection. What is real is only what you feel”

Another LSD inspired drawing.

Wyatt circa 2004.

Nick circa 2004. My closest friend of them all during this time.

Wyatt and Eddie. Circa 2002 or 2003.

Jake and Wyatt, circa 2002. The kids were always happy as fuck in each other’s company. Beyond measure. And I was lucky enough to be a part of that for a few years. As time goes by, I realize it wasn’t just the weed. It was love.

A few ofThe kids, circa 2002-03. Nick is that errant little bastard throwing up a middle finger. He couldn’t ever pose for a picture without flipping the camera off.

*

Thanks for reading.

If you liked this, you might also enjoy:

Music Under The Moon

Zerospace Plays Some Guitar

Advertisement

My Psychedelic Experiences

I’ve been wanting to write about my past psychedelic experiences for a long time. Last night I discovered a great resource for researching psychedelics & experiences that I will plug at the bottom of this post, along with a few other links.

Before we get into my experiences, I gotta plug a few hilarious quotes I found. 

My original intention was to do two separate posts.

One of them was going to be chock-full of funny quotes like those below, plus some quotes that were simply interesting or beautiful. The other post was going to be my personal experiences.

Well, as I continued to read about people’s experiences, I found that most of them just were not as funny as the ones below.

And I don’t have patience to make a big research project out of this whole thing.  

But let’s get into the good stuff.

Quotes

“Moments later I progressed ever deeper into the ego death and lost my sense of self momentarily. I then started to feel that I was the universe searching for itself within itself but had entirely forgotten that it was itself. At this point a brief moment of realization hit me, I realized that I had found myself and that it had been right in front of me all along.”

“I was asking questions aloud to my friends/guardian spirits, like “When did you get here?” (by which I meant, ‘When did you beings come into existence?’), and my friend replied, “We’ve been here the whole time, dude” (this proved to me that they were divine).”

And later, in the same entry:

“One friend stayed behind to keep me company through all this while the other two went exploring, and I asked stuff from time to time (still thinking he was divine); “Where did you come from?” I asked, and he replied by touching my heart and whispering, “We came from inside.” Looking back on it he was simply trolling me, but my mind was blown, again.”

Haha, lmao!  =) That entry above is my absolute favorite.

(The quote below is for Rob in particular)

“I decided it was finally time for me to try to play Mario cart, and as I tried to navigate through the menu with my friend I realized that I could actually still play really well. I chose a map called “rainbow road” for obvious reasons, and the neon rainbow of colors engulfed the entire room as we played. I had never felt this before, but a great peace of everything being connected to me overcame me and I started bawling my eyes out! I kept telling my friends that I was experiencing “pure love” and that the universe loved me!”

(He then goes on to explain that his friends were shitty trip sitters, and it seems like they were just ignoring him while he was having this majestic insight about the universe – how sad).

My experiences

Before we get into my experiences, I should tack a disclaimer on here.

I have never had a bad trip on any psychedelic drug.  However. This was during a very social time of my life.  I was young and I was surrounded by friends I trusted who I spent time hanging out with nearly every day. 

The “set and setting” was continually good because this friend group had such a profoundly positive effect on my life. Thus, even when I tripped alone I never had a bad trip. 

I had not yet developed anxiety or a stressful career. I had zero self-awareness. In other words, I was not yet an adult. I was an adult in age (early 20’s) but not mentally. If I took any of these substances now (besides MDMA), there’s a good chance I’d have a nightmare trip unless something in my life changed to where I could establish general emotional safety, plus a very good set and setting.

LSD

I remember the beginning of my first LSD trip like it was yesterday.  It makes me smile.

Being incredibly dumb as a young person, I took that first dose alone.  My girlfriend must have been at work.  I have no memory of her being there.  I was alone in my first apartment.  

I took a low dose and waited for the effects to kick in. 

It must have been one sugar cube, because I can’t remember any geometric wave patterns from this first trip.  But then, I only remember the first part of the trip.  I do remember a pufferfish on the ceiling.  But we’ll get to that later.

The first thing I remember is a gentle and heady shift in my consciousness.  I remember having a little feeling of excitement.  “Wow, it’s happening!” 

Some time passed, and I looked down at the carpet.  The carpet was one of those low carpets like you’d find in a doctor’s waiting room office.  It was normally dark blue with green specks in it.   

As the effects of the acid kicked in, the floor started turning green.  A neon-colored green.  I was ecstatic.  

I grabbed the cordless phone and dialed my friend Nick.   He answered.

“Nick!” I shouted, “Nick, the floor is turning GREEN!”

Nick chuckled. 

“It sounds like you took that acid.”

“Yes!!!”

I don’t remember what he said after that.  I’m sure that I continued talking about how amazing everything was and he continued chuckling for some time.

I was a big marijuana stoner during this time, and I had recently discovered The 13^th Floor Elevators.  I grabbed a 13^th Floor Elevators album, placed it in the CD deck of my stereo and cranked the music up.

The song “(I’ve Got) Levitation” came on and I was overtaken with musical ecstasy. 

The lyrics talked about the ocean rolling below you.  I jumped up on my couch and looked down at the floor.  I wasn’t hallucinating at this point, but I had a general feeling like the room was more expansive and I imagined my floor as the ocean.   A blue-green ocean of neon.

I jumped from the couch cushions up to the very top of the couch, and then back down to the couch cushions again.  I just remember being ecstatic over the music.

At one point, I looked up at the ceiling.  I couldn’t believe my eyes!  

I saw a flashing pufferfish on my ceiling.  There wasn’t any color or anything, it was just the outline of the pufferfish.  It was in the ceiling texture – those paint bumps you see in apartments.

But it was clearly a pufferfish.  Spikes and everything.  And it was flashing and moving around.

I sat for a while looking up and admiring the pufferfish.

This is an amazing thing about LSD.  Where did this come from?  I didn’t have any particular interest in pufferfish.  But one just appeared randomly.  Created by my fucking brain.  Just… out of nowhere.

*

Apparently, Nick decided that I shouldn’t be alone.  Because at some point there was a knock on the door.  I wasn’t scared because I somehow knew that it was my friends.

I opened the door, and they all piled in.  About 7 or 8 of them.   

I didn’t have much furniture so most of them sat cross legged on the floor. 

They suddenly looked like cabbage patch kids to me.  You know, the doll from the 80’s.   They didn’t literally look like the dolls, but I had a general feeling that they were cabbage patch kids because of the particular way they sat cross legged on the floor.  Their crossed legs were like cabbages and they were cabbage patch kids.

Most of them were a few years younger than me.  I was totally the immature 21-year-old befriending and buying beer for the 17- and 18-year-olds.  And yet… I was the most childlike among the whole crowd.  It was a thing they liked about me and they were special. 

There’s a whole Jack Kerouac-style backstory about how I met these kids that I should tell some other time.  We all remained friends for several years until a primary member of the group committed suicide and shattered each of our lives.

But, at this very moment on LSD they looked like cabbage patch kids to me, and I remember telling them so.  They were always amused by “crazy Melissa” and my weird-ass antics while drunk or stoned.  And they all came over to my apartment because they couldn’t miss the chance to see me on LSD.  Heh.

One of the girls sat next to me on the couch and I handed her my journal with sketches and writings.  She sat there reading it and looked amazed by what she was reading.  I continued tripping but I don’t remember anything else.

This is something I drew with colored pencils during my acid days. I think I was just stoned, but obviously influenced by LSD. I cannot normally draw or even conceive of something like this. I have no idea what the fuck this is. Welcome to your brain on LSD. Even when you are not actively tripping on LSD – it changes your whole perspective and increases creativity for about a week. Do you see the upsidedown bong?

Other trips

I did quite a bit of LSD tripping after that.  There was a great deal of listening to music and staring at the geometric swirls in the fireplace. 

During the most intense experience, I remember I ate a little too much acid.  Probably like 3 or 4 sugar cubes.  Too much for me.  I tried listening to some wild song by Jimi Hendrix.

The whole room smiled at me in mockery.  The edges of everything in the room, and indeed the room itself – it was all bent sharply upward in a mocking smile.  The stereo smiled at me.  It wasn’t a bad trip; it was just a little too intense.  I shut the radio off and waited it out.   This intense moment passed pretty quickly.

One time me and the boys went to Kincaid Park and it was the most amazing trip of my life.  People should trip outdoors under the moonlight.  We climbed this huge hill and looked out over Anchorage’s Cook Inlet.  I can’t remember much of that one, beyond the sheer beauty of Kincaid Park under the moon in early spring.  Which, honestly – I’m sure is amazing while perfectly sober. 

Generally speaking – low to moderate doses of LSD bring a vast amount of geometric form pattern hallucinations.  

You don’t actually have the kind of hallucinations where you see things that are not really there – you just hallucinate moving geometric patterns – at times often quite intricate – in the forms of reality.  Walls, carpets, desktops.  And maybe – as in my case – the occasional form of some kind of animal in the wall or ceiling. 

 Most of the experience is spiritual in nature.  It changes how you feel.  There’s a spiritual transcendence.

I cannot speak for high doses.  I was never brave enough to take a high dose, except the aforementioned “mocking smile” experience.  That was a bit uncomfortable for a while.  My male friends would take much higher doses than I did.  

One time Nick told me that he had a trip after 9 sugar cubes where he thought he swallowed his tongue.  I laughed my ass off and told him that’s why I stuck to lower doses.

One time I drove to Kincaid Park and ate a couple of sugar cubes in the bathroom.  Alone.  I hung out for a while and went and sat in the grass.  Then I went to the bathroom to pee. 

At some point, the walls began turning orange and the geometric hallucinations began.  The walls started breathing.   I had a moment of clarity where I decided it was probably not smart to hang out in the woods alone on LSD.  

I drove home.  High on acid. So – it was not safe enough to be alone in the woods, but driving was apparently fine.  I wrote in more detail about this experience in my post about Soundgarden. 

Because I listened to Soundgarden on the drive home, see.  On full blast.  It was the greatest driving experience of my life. 

But… it was incredibly, incredibly dumb.  I cannot believe I was ever that stupid.  I don’t understand how I made it out of my early 20’s alive.   

I paid close attention to red and green lights.  I drove as carefully as I could and stayed between the highway lines while everything swirled around me.  This was my Hunter S. Thompson moment.

I could have called my girlfriend to come get me.  I realized this half-way through the drive.  But it was too late. 

But when I got home, my girlfriend was zoned out on LSD herself.  She was laying on the couch watching Pink Panther cartoons. 

Heh.  So much for that idea.

Mushrooms

Then came magic mushrooms.  Ooooh, I was arrogant about mushrooms at first.  I thought I could handle a whole bag of mushrooms because I had done so much LSD.

Newsflash:  They’re two different drugs.  You don’t eat a whole fucking bag of mushrooms the first time you try them.   It doesn’t matter how often you’ve been taking LSD.

I was laying on the couch while tripping.  At some point, I completely lost my sense of self.  I had no form.  I had no body. 

I could not perceive where the couch ended, and I began.  All of this happened with my eyes closed.

I closed my eyes and the most incredible visuals with great huge beams of blue light in a shape I can only describe as hourglass-like – they moved in constant patterns like a modern screensaver. 

I was too fucked up to be scared.  I do not remember any fear.  Whatsoever.  I remember being fascinated.  To the extent possible, given that I was no longer a human and I had no human form.

After a while, I came down some and opened my eyes.  I took a drink of my water and it tasted like strawberries.  I was astonished.  I kept drinking more.  How can this be?  I took more sips, it kept tasting like strawberries. 

The best mushroom trip happened with my friend Nick.  

We ate the mushrooms (a reasonable dose this time!) and walked the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail.   As we entered the trail, some type of machine that cleans paved paths was driving toward us.  I was starting to come up.  I was absolutely fascinated. 

“Nick, look at this crazy shit!”

There were a few of these machines and they were like crazy giant bugs – some kind of ant that sprayed water.   He laughed because he saw the same thing.   “Yeah, that’s some weird shit, I know…”

We walked the trail all night long.  Gorgeous.  I had to stop several times to puke.  Mushrooms always had this effect on me. 

Until my friend Crystal informed me that you can cut the nausea by squeezing the good shit out of the mushrooms with a strainer into a cup of double-bagged chamomile tea and steep it for 15 minutes.

It works.  That’s how powerful chamomile tea is.  I never puked or had nausea after making “mushroom tea”.

Here comes the best part:

We entered a park area with picnic tables.  I saw a statue sitting at a picnic table.  I was absolutely fascinated.  I began walking quickly toward the statue.  I heard Nick yell behind me, “Melissa, what you are you doing!?”  He sounded alarmed, but I thought he was just being dramatic.

“I’m going to look at this statue!”

I slowed my pace as I neared the statue.  The statue had its chin resting on its hand – like that whole “To be, or not to be” statue of classical whatever. 

Suddenly, the statue moved!   I gasped and started running away as fast as I could. 

At some point, I stopped and looked back, still alarmed.  I’m not sure why I did this, but I kicked dirt up into the air with my foot.  Like a dog.  And then continued running back toward Nick.

Nick was laughing his ass off.  He was laughing so hard he was in tears.  

“I thought it was a statue!” I explained.

So, let’s consider the perspective of this poor dude.  He’s sitting around thinking about something.  Suddenly, a young woman runs up to him at full speed, slows down, and peers closely at him with wildly dilated eyes.   Ha.  It’s too great. 

Welcome to Anchorage, Alaska.  Stranger things happen in this town.

*

As we walked, seagulls dived at Nick and it scared the shit out of him.  We had walked beneath a nest.  He was trying to punch them in the air.  I laughed at him and he was annoyed at my laughing. And I laughed even more at his annoyance.

I wish I had a better description of walking on the Knowles Trail in summertime on mushrooms.  Especially with a trusted friend. Let me just say this:  This trail in Anchorage is amazing enough on its own.  The lush plants, the summer light.

Nick was planning on leaving for California for winter, and toward the end of the trip we sat in a field with flowers.  Suddenly Nick became Mr. Planning.  Which I thought was hilarious.  

He talked a great deal about things he needed to do for his cats.  Nick always had cats around.  He was very serious about taking care of his pet cats. Which was sweet because he was a young stoner boy. He named one of his cats “Spliff”.  

He talked about his plane leaving at “Nine o’clock in the afternoon”. 

We were still fairly high.  I lost it.  I started laughing my ass off. 

“Nine o’clock is nighttime, Nick, not afternoon!”   He was like, “Oh yeah, I guess you’re right.”

Heh.  Shit like that.  You had to be there. 

MDMA

Ah, then there was MDMA.  Colloquially known as “Ecstasy”.    This was a few years after the LSD and mushrooms. 

Far and away – the CRAZIEST hallucinations I have ever seen happened on MDMA.  This is due to one of two things – either the massive doses I took, or there was something else in those pills.  We’ll get into the hallucinations later.

This was during a very irresponsible time of my life.  I was out of my mind, and I was reckless.  

My good friend had killed himself. 

Only a few months after that incident, I walked in on my best friend and my girlfriend having sex.  

I remember my MDMA trips, but I do not remember much else from this period.  It was the darkest period of my life.

Looking back, I used the MDMA as self-therapy.  I had no one.  My friend group had splintered apart after our mutual friend’s suicide.  The whole group isolated and stopped seeing each other for a while.  

I lived with this best friend of mine. The Betrayer.  So, I had to continue living with this wench for a while until I decided to move back in with my parents.  You can imagine how that went.

Well, unless I was high on MDMA, which I often was.  Then I was okay with the two of them.  But when I came down?  Not so much. I should have moved out sooner, but you see – I couldn’t sit around doing MDMA all night long at my parent’s house.

I did ecstasy alone and it was my therapy.  I forgave them both.  I saw their perspective.  I had intense empathy for myself, for both of them, and for everyone in the whole world.   My friend would walk by and I was like, “Okay, I understand, and I forgive you” and she would be confused because hours earlier I was screaming at her and throwing shit.

I took massive doses.  5 pills at once, and then I took more once the high wore off.  Nick told me I was out of my mind.   He was concerned, but there was nothing he could do about it.

The craziest hallucination was The Parrot.  I worked for a guitar store at the time.  We were allowed to take home awesome promotional posters sent to the store for gear.

I had this poster of Jimi Hendrix with a huge Marshall stack behind him.  It was a Marshall advertisement.  I was high and staring at this poster intensely.  

Suddenly, something started GROWING on this poster.  On Jimi’s shoulder.  It was a bright green color, almost a neon green.  The green thing started as just a little round ball, but the ball kept growing.

The ball continued to slowly grow into a branch!   From the branch, talons formed, and from the talons, legs grew up, and from the legs a torso, wings, and a head!

I sat up and squinted.  I couldn’t believe this was happening.  I knew that I was experiencing a hallucination, I didn’t believe it was real.  But – I had never seen ANYTHING like this on LSD or mushrooms.  The detail was amazing.

Best yet, this was all 3D.  The branch grew out halfway into my living room and the parrot WALKED out onto the branch and stared at me.  It turned its head this way and that, checking me out. 

I got up and grabbed the air.  People are funny like that when high – you know full and well that it’s a hallucination from your mind, but you’re going to try and grab it anyway.  You know.  It just seems so real that you have to make sure. 

I also remember seeing a lot of spiders coming down from the ceiling on webs during this time.  That was unsettling because spiders are a thing that actually exist.  I was always swatting at them just to make sure.  But these hallucinations were so frequent that soon enough I learned to ignore them and listen to my music.

I was constantly listening to The Meat Puppets.  That music is made for MDMA.  There’s no way I can explain this.  The only way you could understand how The Meat Puppets are the perfect MDMA band is to take the drug and listen to the band.

It was so good that I rarely listened to anything else.   

I just listened to this and it took me back. I have not heard this album in a long-ass time. This album was cemented to the point where I can almost feel like I am on MDMA while listening to this.

One morning I had a hallucination that a rat was giving birth in my bathroom heater vent.  I thought it might be a hallucination, but it seemed so real that I couldn’t stop watching and trying to figure it out.  It was disgusting.  These little hairless rodents swirmed around like maggots and the mom rat just kept popping them out. She had like 10 babies and finally it disappeared.

Then I went to work while still high.  I told one of my co-workers about how a rat may have given birth in my heater vent.  I relayed this information while still obviously very high, I’m sure.

I was fired that day, of course.  

Heh. And then four years later I became an HR worker. I never judged people with drug charges on those background checks, let me tell you.

*

And so ends the history of my psychedelic drug use.  I had many fun times.  I did many stupid things.

I have no interest in MDMA but would happily do LSD and mushrooms again under the right circumstances.  But first I would need either a group of close and trusted friends, or a licensed therapist who enjoys supervising these adventures.  I can’t see ever doing any of that shit again on a willy-nilly basis like I did back in the day.  And I would certainly never trip alone. In general, I’m more of an actual adult now and would be very cautious about the whole affair.

If you liked this post, you might like: Smoke Rings Back in Time

*

Source for the wiki quotes:

https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Experience:2.5g_Syrian_rue_%2B_6g_Mimosa_Hostilis_-_Becoming_God_(my_second_experience_with_unity)

https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Experience:4x_200ug_tabs_-_You_do_not_need_to_understand

https://m.psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Experience:LSD_(120ug)_-_An_Overdose_of_LSD_and_Trip_into_Insanity

Psychonaut Wiki Main Page:

https://m.psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Main%20Page

Erowid Psychoactive Vaults:

https://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/psychoactives.shtml

SapienSoup is both scientific and awesome:

https://sapiensoup.com/

The Mule That Kicked down the Barn Door

On a dark stage in 1967, the jazz-rock ensemble Jefferson Airplane perform the song “Crown of Creation” to an enthralled crowd. A large screen flashes a red sun behind the singers as they harmonize. Their voices shimmer and converge into one alchemy of sound as the rhythm guitar pulsates with the light show. The lead guitar cuts through the stage and twists out into the audience like a wild river.

From the first note of their debut album through the last note of 1969’s Volunteers, Jefferson Airplane were a musically diverse force that took the world by storm. They began as a local San Francisco folk-rock band in 1965, and within two years they skyrocketed to fame with the band’s two seminal hits, “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit.” For fans, however, the magic extends far beyond the band’s two hit singles.

The Airplane sound will guide listeners through an echo tunnel and into a world the band’s rhythm guitarist Paul Kantner once called, “The unbridled passion of the 60’s”. Jefferson Airplane soared to the top of the charts during a time when rock music was exploding with talent, new ideas, and technology.

The band’s professionalism and thunderous live performances attracted local San Francisco musician Grace Slick, the member who ultimately launched the band to superstardom.

Like all legendary bands, a mysterious element drove the Airplane’s sound. The songs drew from a dynamic color palette loaded with reverb and surrounded by layers of gauzy dreamscape. They were unique among other popular bands of the time for their ability to seamlessly combine folk-based music with jazz, blues, and psychedelia.

The music and the overall persona of the band were an ideology. Among all the other legendary rock bands from the 1960’s, it was Jefferson Airplane who cut directly into the heart of the scene. Their music represented the boundless optimism, joy, and romance of the era

My introduction to the Airplane began with Grace Slick’s face on the cover of her 1998 autobiography, Grace Slick: Somebody to Love?

One day, I wandered around a bookstore browsing for anything that looked interesting. I walked up to the front and turned toward the new release shelf. A shiny cover with a woman’s face captured my eye. I did a double take and froze. The most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in my life was staring me down with unnerving intensity. Grace Slick’s infamous “laser stare” stopped me in my tracks.

I immediately walked over to the book and opened it up. The first page contained several author quotes about drug experiences, trouble with the law, and various other comic tidbits. They were hilarious and I was sold.

After reading the book a couple of times, I finally picked up a copy of the Airplane compilation album, White Rabbit and Other Hits. I listened, and I was hooked.

As it turned out, this beautiful and funny Grace Slick was also a fantastic singer. The interplay between the various instruments and the two voices — Grace and Marty Balin — was unlike anything I had experienced. Complex layers of minor key madness danced around soft rhythm brushstrokes. The music flashed with colors while the lyrics evoked rich imagery.

Year by year, each album by the Airplane portrays a changing era. Their debut album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, reveals a more innocent, folksy vibe than later albums.

The album was released in 1966, right at the turning point before full-blown psychedelia and heavier rock hit the airwaves. The song “Run Around” is awash in late night carnival lights. Two lovers romance around the town walking along the waterfront, reading poetry and gazing at the stars.

Many songs on the album are folk-based, but it’s more than folk. The sound stretches beyond traditional folk into a sonic dimension specific to this band that defies both genre and description.

1967’s Surrealistic Pillow represents the big shift in the Airplane’s sound. Grace’s searing vocal on “Somebody to Love” drives the song forward while Jorma Kaukonen’s lead guitar slides out from underneath the ground and hangs on the ceiling. The album intertwines the Airplane’s earlier folk influences with a new power — bluesy and raging.

Surrealistic Pillow has plenty of quieter moments as well. The acoustic guitar in “Today” sounds like water dropping into a dark pond surrounded by neon flowers. The drums reverberate with pink hues.

“Coming Back to Me” features a flute backed by acoustic guitar, but again, this is no ordinary folk song. The imagery is so rich that you can see the protagonist. You are him. It’s autumn, you’re deep in the woods. You’re alone in a cabin. You look out the window — there’s the ghost of your lover. The purity of Balin’s voice lends itself perfectly to the song’s theme.

On their 1968 album, After Bathing at Baxter’s, the Airplane dived headfirst into insanity. At this point, everyone in the rock world was competing with Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix dropped into the scene and blazed fiery trails of new sonic territory. Everyone was floored by Hendrix’s sound, and all the popular rock acts of the day began playing differently.

As a result of Hendrix’s influence (and as a result of the emerging drug culture), some incredibly weird albums emerged in 1968. After Bathing at Baxter’s is one such album.

Baxter’s is a big yellow jazz room with wooden floorboards and xylophones. Men wearing top hats and red suspenders pound on drums. The guitar becomes a spaceship, Grace’s singing sounds tribal at moments, and the lyrics are surreal.

The song “Wild Tyme” has a marching band feel, the sound of excitement and determination. Flower children march through the streets and over fields. Now they’re pouring out of buildings and the crowd is growing. A couple observes all the changes happening everywhere. They’re wild with joy. They have each other, their friends — everything stretches out in endless possibilities.

“Saturday Afternoon” is another gem; hillsides full of people dance in the sun, and that persistent chiming guitar is a call to a greater power within.

The production and general sound of Baxter’s is bizarre. It’s like they’re playing underground. The band are down in the underworld playing through a bullhorn, and it’s connected to a wire that snakes up through miles of dirt and plugs into your stereo.

Crown of Creation is Jefferson Airplane at their best. The album combines all their earthy folksiness with striking moments of lead guitar and rhythm prowess.

The song “Crown of Creation” is one of my favorites; filled with ancient caves, meadows, and gold. Crown is darker than previous albums, owing partly to the increasing song contributions of Grace Slick. Always the darkest musical force in the band, Grace wrote scathing lyrics directed at society. The backing music was ominous and unsettling, but darkly alluring. Just like her beauty.

1969’s Volunteers has a few gems, most notably “Wooden Ships”, but this is the album where the band starts to lose me. The sound is almost country in places. This phase of the Airplane, however, was also a reflection of the changing music scene. The psychedelic 60’s gave way to a brief country-rock fad, shortly before heavier bands like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin stormed the charts.

“Wooden Ships” is the finest song from Volunteers. You can see and feel the boat crashing over the waves. You can taste the salt. The song is a fitting goodbye — Jefferson Airplane set a course away from popular music with one final and passionate song.

They would never return. But in their wake, they left an unsurpassed legend for generations to enjoy.

“We played at the Monterey jazz festival, and someone wrote a review. They said we sounded like a mule kicking down a barn door. We all liked that, you know! We thought, wow, that’s great. Among all these jazz guys we sound like a mule kicking a barn door.”

-Marty Balin

“Every time I hear “White Rabbit,” I am back on the greasy midnight streets of San Francisco, looking for music, riding a fast red motorcycle downhill into the Presidio, leaning desperately into the curves through the eucalyptus trees, trying to get to the Matrix in time to hear Grace Slick play the flute”  – Hunter S. Thompson

About ZeroSpace

The Ghost Returns / How To Disappear Completely

Republish from April 2019. Long ago, I sat in my living room listening to Amnesiac by Radiohead with a head full of LSD.

I stared at the fireplace, slack-jawed and wide-eyed, watching the giant stones swirl in geometric patterns. Listening intently, I tried to understand the pops, clicks, and clanks of “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box”. I was awestruck; everything made complete sense, yet it made no sense at all.

“Pyramid Song” started playing and I sat up. The flood gates of my mind opened; a river of emotion flowed into my ears and out of my eyes, a gleaming mirror formed in my field of vision as music notes danced on the surface.

Fog rolled into my living room. As the orchestra kicked up and Thom Yorke moaned wistfully, a lighthouse beacon appeared. I was on a ship in the ocean. I looked over the edge and saw those black-eyed angels Thom was singing about. I looked up to a dark blue sky laced with pink clouds above the twilight. The songs became stranger and infinitely more beautiful as the album unfurled.

Amnesiac isn’t an album on LSD — it’s an odyssey.

---

I can never fully describe the experiences I had listening to Amnesiac on acid. The description above is a rough, crude sketch that doesn’t begin to convey the level of beauty and strangeness I witnessed in that living room.

Amnesiac had a calming quality, but it was also brittle, vast and perplexing. I could drink in the cold passion while I wrapped my brain around the puzzles within the sound. I could never solve those puzzles, but I never tired of the effort.

Radiohead’s music has been the soundtrack to moments of intense connection and grief in my life. Looking back, it was the calming and therapeutic quality of Amnesiac that hooked me above everything else.

Now I’m returning to Radiohead for the same reason, exploring late period music I overlooked in the last decade and discovering songs that serve my journey now the way Amnesiac served my acid trips in 2003.

---

I’ve recently experienced severe anxiety. It’s subsiding now, but this Nightmare Land lasted nearly a month. When anxiety strikes, it’s like a series of waves crashing. When the tide goes out, you’re left with an ethereal, ghost-like feeling. That’s disassociation. This is your brain’s way of dealing with adrenaline overload. It’s almost like being high. It’s a welcome relief from the feeling that you will collapse from fear.

For that reason — the “high” thing — I’ve been purposely feeding it with Radiohead. Because nobody does disassociation like Radiohead. They’ve been doing it well for a while.

The album A Moon Shaped Pool is arguably Radiohead’s crowning achievement in otherworldly disconnection. Today I walked 4 miles in the sun listening to A Moon Shaped Pool, just floating along on my ghost trip. Normally while the sun is out, I won’t touch Radiohead. On a sunny day I usually prefer bombastic guitar-based music.

But not today… because it doesn’t matter what the weather is. I’m up here in my head. People pass by and they’re in another realm. I can almost pretend I’m invisible. They ruin it sometimes by looking directly at me, but not often because I don’t look at them.

But I have Radiohead.

I have the gothic choral strains of “Decks Dark” in my ear, and I could float up to the damn sky on the refrain if I wanted to. I could climb the arpeggios of “Present Tense” up to a rainbow. I don’t need to eat lunch or dinner to walk 4 miles, and I don’t need much sleep. I’m never tired and I’m never fully awake.

But I have Radiohead.

---

And I have Radiohead backward…. Backward, way back through the smoke rings of my mind…way back through the haze of all that weed I used to smoke. I see Wyatt when he was still alive, playing a Radiohead song on his acoustic guitar.

I see Wyatt before he killed himself and shattered the lives of everyone who loved him. Before the memory of 20-year old boys howling in pain at his wake, some of them quiet with tear-stained faces, before the memory of his stoic mom barely holding it together, greeting kids so bravely, hugging me and asking where I’ve been lately.

Before all this, I see Wyatt in his room.

I see Wyatt who idolized Thom Yorke before he became obsessed with Tom Waits, who he probably learned about from Thom Yorke. We’re in his room, just me and him. We’re smoking weed and he’s playing the riff to “Street Spirit” over and over again, getting it down.

Fast forward to a different night under the full moon shining down on Cook Inlet in Kincaid Park. There’s me, Wyatt, and two other boys trekking through the woods at night, climbing up an endless hill to gaze at the jeweled moon. Three of us took acid that night, and I wasn’t the sober one. Neither was Wyatt.

There’s Wyatt pulling out a spoon to show me the reflection of the moon on its silver rounded surface, as if he’d brought a spoon just for this occasion. We’re on top of a grassy hill overlooking the vast inlet below. We all have headphones on. I’m listening to OK Computer by Radiohead. I take my headphones off and I hear the faint, tinny scratches from Wyatt’s headphones. I ask him what he’s listening to. He tells me he’s listening to Ok Computer.

I smile wide and tell him that’s what I’m listening to. We didn’t discuss what we’d listen to beforehand. It’s not an album I listen to much anymore since I discovered Radiohead’s Kid A, but it seems right for the moment. Apparently, Wyatt thinks so too. I marvel at the synchronicity for a moment before getting lost in something else within that long magic night under the Alaskan moon.

Fast forward a couple of years later and there I am in my bedroom, still stunned in disbelief that Wyatt is gone. Listening to “How to Disappear Completely”. Listening to other Radiohead songs. Listening to other music I like that Wyatt also liked, laying there like a stone unable to move for days. Going over every memory I have of him in my mind from the past 4 years.

---

Last week I thought I was losing my mind; staying drunk to get food down on account of anxiety, hiking the woods during the day, and finding relief near the ocean. Then I returned, and I had Radiohead.

For a few days I couldn’t listen to anything but “Codex”. This song is a perfect example of Thom Yorke’s brilliance as a singer. You’ll first listen the song focusing on the sound, not paying attention to the lyrics. You’ll hear a word here and there. “Dragonflies… the water is clear…”, that’s all you can make out.

But it doesn’t matter because his voice is like a bell from heaven combined with a raw nerve. The whole meaning of the song is stretched out in every yearning moan elicited between his quieter moments of despondency. He soars up and bellows out that great beautiful bell-tone ache, then slides down quietly as if to say, “this is so sad, I can’t even”.

One day I looked up the lyrics. When you read the lyrics without listening to the music, they sit flat on the page. The words are so devoid by themselves that it’s almost comical. However, once you know the lyrics and then listen to the song again, the beatific emerges. Now this song is about getting lost in the serenity of the woods. You’ve done nothing wrong and you don’t deserve this. Here’s the clear water now. Take a break.

---

I love songmeanings.com. Looking up songs on this website is sometimes an exercise in comedy, but it always provides revealing insight into people’s lives. I looked up “Codex” on this site (found here), and as usual I’m entertained.

Many people think it’s about suicide. Someone thinks it’s about political conspiracy. Another guy thinks it’s about flying a military plane and carpet-bombing civilians. Someone else thinks it’s about Radiohead breaking up. Another person thinks it’s about Christianity and the clear lake is holy water.

The interpretations people come up with are a reflection of their own lives and beliefs, and that’s the genius of songmeanings.com.

The highest rated comment is my favorite, and I have co-opted it for my own purposes. The commenter posits that it’s about “the Buddhist spiritual cycle of life, death, and rebirth” — that it’s about “exploring the unfamiliar within ourselves and abandoning our previous shells”. He then provides evidence that one of the songs is titled “Lotus Flower” and other songs on the album follow a similar pattern thematically.

This is a beautiful interpretation, and I can no longer hear the song any other way. After reading this, “Codex” changed from being just a sad song about being isolated and needing a break to a song about experiencing sadness, but finding hope through a spiritual path.

And it took Radiohead to get there.

If you liked this, you might also like Saturn Returns

About ZeroSpace

---

I jumped in the river, what did I see?
Black-eyed angels swam with me
A moon full of stars and astral cars
And all the figures I used to see

All my lovers were there with me
All my past and futures
And we all went to heaven in a little row boat
There was nothing to fear and nothing to doubt

There was nothing to fear, nothing to doubt

-Pyramid Song, Radiohead

Playin’

I can’t find an audio app that doesn’t pick up allll the string squeak on that last one. The last one I made up and it’s called “Billy Corgan and Ani Difranco had a Baby.” heh heh heh heh. You’ll see.

-ZS

My Viking Fantasy (Ruined…)

Have you ever listened to a song for years only to realize one day that you’re wrong about the meaning behind the lyrics?

For me, it can totally ruin the song.

“Achilles Last Stand” by Led Zeppelin was my battle song.

I thought it was about Vikings sailing into battle.

I would really get into it.

I was a warrior woman on that Viking boat. I stood near the bow with a sword in my hand and copper cuffs on each wrist. My eyes narrowed, the ocean sprayed my face, the boat bobbed up and down over waves… and I experienced the greatest endorphin rush of my life.

Sexy bearded men stood all around me, and they all had great legs.

We were Vikings, and we were going to win.

I also looked this good and had that same french manicure.

Everything about this song screams battle song – the pulsating bass, the drums, even the title. The last stand.

At some point, I read an article which revealed the song’s true origin. The title of the song was inspired by a car wreck. Robert Plant busted his foot in a car wreck, and the title is a clever play on that incident.  Awww, how cute.

The actual content of the song is about vacationing in Morocco.

Or something.

Whatever the case may be, I can no longer hear this song without thinking about Plant’s damned foot.

All I can see is Plant’s foot wrapped in bandages while a bunch of long-hairs with sunglasses relax around an outdoor pool.  This is decidedly less glamorous than my fantasy.  But I can’t go back!  The damage is done.

Bastards.

This also happened when I read the lyrics to “Rhinoceros” by The Smashing Pumpkins. There’s a lyric which I always thought was “Open your eyes to these monster lies”.

OPEN YOUR EYES TO THESE MONSTER LIES.

Just look at that lyric!  The power!  As it turns out, the “monster” part is wrong.  For me, that was the most important part.

Monster is defined as “huge” in this context.  There are HUGE lies all around us.

Open your friggin’ eyes, people!  These lies surrounding us are monstrous! This “monster” element made the lyric incredibly powerful.  It added to the depth of the overall sound.

The actual lyric is, “Open your eyes to these must I lie”.

What?! What the hell does that even mean? Some lyric websites say “mustard lies”, which is far worse. It’s almost offensive. “Monster Lies” is much better.  It improves the whole character of the lyric.

It’s amazing how people can interpret song meanings and lyrics.  I recently looked up the lyrics to “Soot and Stars”, another Pumpkin song.  To me, this song is about loss and transition. It’s poetic and sorrowful.

What do other people think this song means?

This is the first comment about “Soot and Stars” at songmeanings.com:

“This song is obviously about Star Wars. It describes the feelings of Darth Vader after all has happened and is said and done”.

I laughed out loud for about 10 seconds when I read that.  I would have choked if I was eating.  I am fairly certain that the guy was being satirical.  But, it proves the point – people can interpret songs and other works in surprisingly diverse ways.

It actually wouldn’t surprise me if someone really believed, with all his heart, that these lyrics are about Star Wars.  Yes, that man contemplating his career and life choices is Darth Vader.

“Pssssh. Duhhh, how can you not tell?  That’s what makes it so poetic and sorrowful.”

Because I can totally judge Star Wars fans about their fantasy life.

***

If you liked this, you might also like Revenge of The Tire Witch

About ZeroSpace

Slip Inside This Dream

The 13th Floor Elevators are the best kept secret in the history of 1960’s rock music.

My first encounter with The Elevators happened on a primitive version of streaming radio. This station also introduced me to The Who, Eric Burdon, The Stooges, Black Sabbath, King Crimson, and many other acts that I soon became obsessed with.  It wasn’t “classic rock” to me back then.  It was just this new, incredible music.

As with many other bands that I fell in love with around this time, I heard one good song and proceeded to immediately order a couple ofalbums from their catalog. When I heard the Elevators, I ordered their two legendary albums, The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators, and Easter Everywhere.

I sat in my living room completely enthralled by both albums. The first album mixed 50’s style rock n’ roll with blues. Roky Erickson’s voice arrested my attention right away; he moaned and screamed like a zombie possessed by electric current.

The lead guitar cut through the mix with alarming precision, and the overall effect was masterful. A kind of magnetic force or energy drove the entire sound which can’t be explained in standard music terms – there was a conviction, an absolute now or never attitude. It sounded like a group of fire and brimstone preachers decided to form a rock band.

The first time I listened, I sat cross-legged on the floor directly in front of my stereo. I put on Psychedelic Sounds and started reading the liner notes.  The liner notes had this weird philosophical content. I was immediately puzzled.  The writing was academic, but strangely esoteric. The text seemed a little heavy for the album opener; a country-fried punk stomper called “You’re Gonna Miss Me”.

As “Roller Coaster” began playing, I listened to the lyrics closely.  At this point, I began to slowly piece everything together.

Here we arrive at the mystique of innocence – that moment of discovery when you absorb information for the first time, but you have no idea who the author is. You have no precedent for the information you are receiving – no historical context for whatever theory, song, or piece of knowledge imparted to you.  It was just new, strange, and exciting.

I was blown away.  Roky Erickson’s haunting, reverb-saturated voice blasted through the speakers and created a resounding echo in my living room.  A very strange whooping sound flew back and forth across the speakers. I turned the dial up.  The music shifted suddenly and dropped into a swirling whirlpool of menacing blues guitar and raga.

Easter Everywhere was different, but equally good. “Slip Inside This House” combined lyrics inspired by classical poetry with music that somehow matched the lyrical content. It’s still amazing to me that they pulled this off.  It was a feat of genius. The Elevators completely outshined other underground bands from that era.

Their story is a sad one.  The general narrative contains two key circumstances that contributed to their plight – an incompetent Texas record label, and their insistence on consuming LSD on a regular basis. Excessive drug use ultimately lead to mental health issues among several band members, most notably Roky Erickson.

Their live shows are the stuff of legend.  People who saw them live in their heyday have said that the albums are nothing compared to their early live shows.  They played live on LSD, and it apparently didn’t slow them down at all.

In interviews, people who went to their live shows in 1966 say they were the kings of the San Francisco scene. All of the Bay Area bands from this period went to see The Elevators, and they were all floored.

The consensus among people who knew them and saw their performances is that if they would have backed off the drug use and aligned themselves with a good record label, they could have been as big as the Rolling Stones.

The reality is that their situation was a catch-22.  The Elevators whole philosophy (and all the strange power behind their music) was driven by consciousness expansion. They wouldn’t have remained the same band if they had cleaned up and started behaving. Instead, they became the very definition of a cult band.

Years later, I can still feel the chills rush over me when I play these albums. My heartbeat kicks up, the speakers magnetize my blood and I want to be inside of that strange musical canvas. I want to just walk right into that room.

These albums are best listened to by candlelight and without any distraction. This is music you cannot listen to passively.  As with Jefferson Airplane, Jeff Buckley, Tori Amos, and The Smashing Pumpkins, you live inside of this music.

It is an alternate universe; a sonic island that redefines the concept of what music is. It’s a philosophy, an experience, and a dream – alive and pulsating in time.  It shapes your mood and your perception of the environment around you. When you connect to music this good, you transcend your life. You transcend into a power connected to everything.

~~~~~~~~~

If you liked this, you might like Jefferson Airplane

About ZeroSpace

“Every day is another dawning
Give the morning winds a chance
Always catch your thunder yawning
Lift your mind into the dance
Sweep the shadows from your awning
Shrink the four fold circumstance
That lies outside this house
Don’t pass it by”

-Slip Inside This House

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Magnificent Quotes (Inspiration)

“I think society is moving a little bit, but I think it isn’t moving near that fast. There’s always gonna be a large, huge bulk of straight people that aren’t going for it.”

“Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, they are so subtle.  They can milk you with two notes. They could go no further than from an A to a B, and they could make you feel like they told you the whole universe… but I don’t know that yet.  All I have now is strength.  Maybe if I keep singing I’ll get it.”

“I always felt that way about the blues, even when I didn’t know anything about it.  When I listened to it, I always felt there was something there – an honesty that Peggy Lee was lacking. And now the kids are open enough to say, ‘Now, wait a minute, let me listen for myself’, and those kids are getting into Indian music, getting into black music, getting into any kind of music they think is telling the truth to them.”

“This success thing hasn’t yet compromised the position I took a long time ago in Texas; to be true to myself and not play games. To be the person inside me, not bullshit anybody, be righteous, be real. So far, I’m not wearing cardboard eyelashes and girdles and playing in Las Vegas.  I’m still being Janis. It just happens to be on a slightly different level.”

“It’s slightly inhibiting, but it doesn’t force a game on me.  Because I don’t let it force a game on me.” (The interviewer asks if the camera is inhibiting, and this is her response).  

-Janis Joplin

Hunter S. Thompson

“There was madness in any direction, at any hour… you could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, we were winning.  That sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail.  We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.” 

 “’You found the American Dream, in this town?’ [he asked].  I nodded. ‘We’re sitting on the main nerve right now’, I said. ‘You remember that story the manager told us about the owner of this place? How he always wanted to run away and join the circus?’ Bruce ordered 2 more beers. He looked over the casino for a moment and shrugged. ‘Yeah, I see what you mean,’ He said. ‘Now the bastard has his own circus, and a license to steal, too’.  He nodded.  ‘You’re right, he’s the model.’”

“The room looked like the site of some disastrous zoological experiment involving whisky and gorillas.”

“The rear windows leapt up with a touch, like frogs in a dynamite pond.”

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (2008) Documentary Directed by Alex Gibney Shown: Hunter S. Thompson

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby

“She was not only singing; she was weeping too. Whenever there was a pause in the song, she filled it with gasping, broken sobs, and then took up the lyric again in a quavering soprano. The tears coursed down her cheeks – not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets. A humorous suggestion was made that she sings the notes on her face.”

“The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot. The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher… the groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wandering confident girls who weave here and there and become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group, and then excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices under the constantly changing light.  Suddenly, one of the gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage, and moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform.”

“The wind has blown off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life.”

“Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees – he could climb to it if he climbed alone, and once there he could gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.  He waited, listening a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star.”

Grace Slick

“A startling presence, both visually and vocally.  An Oscar Wilde in drag who combined insight and sarcasm that was sometimes light, sometimes dark.  A provocateur.”  – Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane

Somebody to Love?  1998 Grace Slick Biography

“There’ll always be people who are afraid of living and afraid of dying. And there will always be more of them than there are risk-takers, the people who bring innovation into every area, with our without drugs.”

“Since all changes, no matter how small, are absorbed into and add impetus to the ongoing paradigm shift, nothing ever really slips away. The old themes and styles persisted as stitches in the unfurling tapestry, but they were hard to see. What caught the eye was all the newness.”

“As we lay on our backs in the tall grass on the mountain, each person made a brief awestruck remark about the diversity and synchronicity of the clouds, the air, the trees, and the animals.  It was on that mountaintop where I first understood that you and I are only separated by one channel of a limited thought process.  If I looked long enough, colors on the same object would slowly change in accordance with my ability to take in the transformation. My usual focused perspective was expanded.  Instead of viewing certain things or people as passing scenery, as something inconsequential, the peyote made everything, and everyone seem equally important.  Suddenly I could see no isolation, no overabundance. It was just energy exhibiting itself in infinite dimensions.”

“Four gigantic Altec speakers were set up so we could literally feel the playback, the technology could squeeze or explode a sound… there were countless knobs and dials and wires to mold a song into an aural vision, and I was fascinated by all of it.”

 “When a band is in sync and everybody is playing well and feeling good, there’s nothing like it. You, both the audience and performers, become the power of the music.  It’s a biological as well as spiritual phenomenon and it still happens to me when I’m riding around in a car or sitting at home listening to 130 decibels of speaker-cracking music. An almost tangible shift in feeling happens as I go from thick to weightless.”

“Imagine it’s a Saturday night, and there’s a line of what looks like a bunch of young multi-colored circus freaks waiting to go into the Fillmore Auditorium.  The crowd is animated, everybody is talking to each other even though they may have just met for the first time. The only visible sign of color on the outside of the building is a poster drawn in Day-Glo swirls.  It reads ‘Jefferson Airplane, The Charlatans, Moby Grape and The Great Society.’  When the door to the building opens, the last of the grey vanishes. At the top of the steps that lead to Fillmore’s main hall there is a wall of bright, intensely colored posters.  They’re so numerous that the wall itself is invisible. As you walk onto the dance floor, you have the feeling you’ve just entered seven different centuries all thrown together in one room.  The interior of the building is turn-of-the century rococo, and a man in red briefs and silver body paint is handing out east Indian incense.  A girl in full renaissance drag is spinning around by herself listening to some baroque music in her head while several people in jeans and American Indian headbands are sitting in a circle on the floor smoking weed. Close by, a good-looking man in a three-musketeer costume is placing ashtrays on the cheap fifties Formica tables that circle the edge of the room. In the corner, people are stripping off their clothes while the acid is taking effect. This is The American Dream (for a few hours) with no color barriers, dress code, moral imperatives, and only one keeper – the show’s intense but smiling dark haired promoter – Bill Graham.”

Jack Kerouac

“But there was a wisdom in it all, as you’ll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street, each with the lamplight of the living room shining golden, and inside the little blue square television, each family riveting it’s attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards, dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of on wheels… I seem him in future years stalking along with full rucksack in suburban streets, passing the blue tv windows of homes, alone, his thoughts the only thoughts not electrified to the master switch… the millions of the One Eye.” -The Dharma Bums

“It was a mad crowd. They were all urging that tenor man to hold it and keep it with cries and wild eyes, and he was raising himself from a crouch and going down again with his horn, looping it up in a clear cry above the furor. Everybody was rocking and roaring… boom, kick, that drummer was kicking his drums down the cellar and rolling the beat upstairs with his murderous sticks, rattley-boom! The pianist was only pounding the keys with spread eagled fingers, chords at intervals when the great tenor man was drawing breath for another blast… The tenor man jumped down from the platform and stood in the crowd, blowing around, his hat was over his eyes… he just hauled back and stamped his foot and blew down a hoarse, laughing blast, and drew breath, and raised the horn and blew high, wide and screaming in the air.” -On the Road

“See, the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, dharma bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming all that crap they didn’t need anyway. All of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work.  I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution, thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks going up to the mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad.”  -The Dharma Bums

Wayne Coyne

Some interview.  Original Source not recorded in the notebook these are typed from.

“’The good times, it’s hard to make them last.’ – I think what people are hearing somewhere along the way is that the good times don’t just come at you. You almost have to create them.  You have to make sure that you’re searching out some sort of meaning and some sort of happiness throughout.”

“It just makes you stop in your tracks and go, ‘What’s it all worth?’ We’re all just hurtling through space. At any moment the whole thing could just run into some asteroid out there and we’re all gonna blow up and how insignificant and meaningless and what a speck of existence our life is, and I think I sing about that a lot.  When I sing utterly with fear about how insignificant I am, that’s the only time we sound significant. Isn’t that funny?”

Exuberant Joy and the Infinite Night

March 23^rd 2016 was a special night. A friend and I went to the famous Paramount Theatre in Seattle to experience my favorite band of all time.

Buzzed out of my mind on sheer anticipation, I spent the entire night of March 22^nd walking around while listening to the entire Smashing Pumpkins catalog on shuffle.   Afterward, I proceeded to watch several hours of DVD concert footage.

If I could only convince myself on a regular basis that I was going to see one of my favorite bands the next day, I would always be in a splendid mood. Maybe that’s the key to life – just willfully enter a state of perpetual delusion and stay there forever. Sounds good to me.

Luckily for me, I wasn’t merely pretending that there was a show the following night.  There was a show, and it was my favorite band. I had not attended a Pumpkins show for sixteen years. Rumors were flying around that Billy Corgan had taken to playing classic songs again.

I couldn’t have been more excited. Somehow, I managed to sleep.

The next day, I drove into Seattle at a furious rate of speed. I met up with my friend and concert companion for a pre-show dinner and beer. We raced around the grey city together; the world whizzed by speckled with a hazy, dreamy sheen. The air was feather-light and pleasant against my skin, the pavement swirled in lollipop patterns beneath my skipping feet. It was the kind of moment people yearn for – the natural high of exuberant joy.

After dinner, we rushed off to The Paramount Theatre. The Paramount is gorgeous – it was the perfect setting for this show; ornate furnishings, chandeliers, and dim lighting. My friend and I took turns smiling at each other with idiotic pleasure.

Finally, we entered the auditorium and took our seats. Murky red lights glowed on the carpeted walls. Hushed voices whispered all around us, rising and falling in crescendos of excited anticipation. The lights dimmed, and Billy Corgan’s profile stalked across the shadowy stage.  He picked up his acoustic guitar and stood in the dark.

I stiffened to attention immediately.  I sat up straight on the edge of my seat, erect as a steel rod.

“Is that him!?” she whispered in my ear.

“F— yes, that’s him!” I whispered back impatiently, reeling with barely contained joy.

It was unmistakably Billy; his figure loomed over 6 feet tall, wearing his trademark black suit, sporting his notorious bald head. That was him. His long arm reached for his guitar. The house lights came up. He stood before us in a single spotlight.

The auditorium hushed.

He began playing “Tonight, Tonight” on acoustic guitar. I could feel my eyes welling up with tears. A pleasant shock overcame my senses; the moment was completely surreal. His voice carried through the air in front of me, emerging in real time and happening in front of my face.

They played songs that I never thought I would hear live. The whole middle section of the show was dedicated to the Siamese Dream era.  They played a suite of four or five songs from Siamese Dream, including one of my favorites, “Soma”, reworked for piano instead of guitar.

I had to resist a very strong urge to run up to the front of the auditorium and stand under Billy, right in front of the stage. I wanted to run up and stand directly below him.

I had to resist this urge several times.

I have never experienced such a visceral pull before. I was being physically pulled by a force beyond my control. I maintained extreme willpower to resist that urge. Respect for both the band and the audience allowed me to hold onto my sense and keep my wits about me.

That experience recalls a memory from when I worked in a guitar store 11 years ago.  I was the only female working at the store among several young men, all talented musicians.  My co-workers and I would occasionally watch music performances on video when business was slow. One day, we watched footage of The Beatles performing in 1964. Young women threw themselves down and rolled on the floor. They screamed at the top of their lungs, flailed their arms, cried, and fainted.

The guys couldn’t believe it. They stared, awestruck and envious. “God!” one of the guys declared, “Those girls!  Damn, girls were crazy back then!”  I smiled slyly – the reaction of the boys was as amusing to me as the footage of girls in the throes of Beatlemania.

Years later, I now understand the tidal force that possessed those poor girls.

My fellow concert-goers were an experience as well; they were clearly hardcore fans. Everyone stood up after all the popular songs.  They yelled, whistled, and begged for more. The men shouted, “BILLLLLLLY!” in long, drawn out howls.  I surveyed the crowd in ecstasy.  It was thrilling to be immersed in a symphony of devotion that mirrors my own.  I looked around frantically, trying to drink everyone into my eyes and senses. Many were around my age, not surprisingly.  Some were a little younger.  My friend who attended is 10 years younger than I, but she claims she listened to The Pumpkins in high school.  They are the new Pink Floyd.  They span decades.

Billy’s star was shining as bright as ever that night.  It was all there – flawless guitar solos, high clear singing, fascinating interplay with the other instrumentalists.  My favorite part of the show was the look in his eyes during moments where he scanned the audience as we screamed and went crazy after songs.  He looked like a little boy on Christmas morning.

As he scanned the crowd, his eyes lit up with love and appreciation.  He smiled. The look in his eyes was genuine and unmistakable. His eyes shone with affection. Corgan has never been a guy to hide genuine emotions. So much of what he is (and what fans are) is The Child.  That brief flash of his eyes was everything.  He has a reputation for being the most arrogant and incorrigible asshat in the music world.  Fans know a whole other side of the man –  we laugh at the interviews, push them aside in amusement, and listen to the music.

As a bonus, Jimmy Chamberlin came out and drummed for a few songs.  The crowd went apeshit when Jimmy emerged on the stage.  A few nights later, original member James Iha also joined the band for a few songs in another town. I am horribly envious of the people who attended those shows.   Those fans were damn lucky.

After the show, my friend declared this was the best show she’s ever seen at The Paramount. In 2015 she saw her favorite band, Modest Mouse, at the Paramount. She said that something was off with Mouse, that the sound wasn’t quite right.

I smiled broadly. “Well, of course, my dear,” I said in a tone of obvious superiority, “This is The Pumpkins, you see”.

I feel lucky that my hero is still alive.  Above everything else, this is proof that the greatest talents of a generation do not have to die young. Great talents may release less exciting albums as they age, but you can still see them live.

I wanted it to last forever.  Even now I wish I could jump back into the moment. But, like any good trip, you must come back sometime.  Then you’re just left with the memory.

And what a sweet memory at that.

***

Originally published in 2016.

About ZeroSpace

Kill Your Panic (But Do It Slowly).

I experienced a severe anxiety attack recently, which reminded me how bad anxiety really is.  How could I forget? I am a person who will stuff unpleasant things away and forget them soon after the stress is gone. This is probably typical for other people too – a panic attack is something we’d all like to forget.

Okay.  So, what is this post all about?

I’m going to type up several passages from a landmark anxiety book – “Hope and Help for Your Nerves” by Dr. Claire Weekes. In doing so, I’m hoping to help anyone who runs across this post by introducing them to this amazing panic & anxiety resource.

At the end I will include a link, so that you can go buy the book from Amazon if you wish (and you really should!)

This book is a pioneering text in the field of anxiety self-help.  When I first began suffering from severe anxiety, reading this book provided me immense comfort and was my first step in getting better at that point in time. Claire Weekes was a fantastic writer.  Additionally, based on her own descriptions of conversations she had with patients in this book, I believe that she was a superior doctor.

Before we begin, I have an important point of caution – this book is old.  It’s from the early 1960’s.  Despite the publication date, the coping strategies in this book are effective.  Panic and anxiety have always existed, no matter which name was given to this condition in past eras.

The goals that Dr. Weekes has set for panic disorder sufferers are extremely challenging.  This is serious work. She asks that we learn to do things like “Float past” fear at the “peak of experience”. 

In other words, when you’re experiencing your worst moment of panic, she’s asking you to recall and use the tools she prescribes in this book.  

Naturally, this seems like an impossibly difficult task.  I just had severe anxiety two days ago.  It’s fresh on my mind.  It felt impossible during my anxiety attack to “float” past the issue. The only solution is to reread this text and practice the concepts so that we can slowly master these skills over time.

SELECTIONS FROM “HOPE AND HELP FOR YOUR NERVES”

Dr. Claire Weekes, 1963

The Three Main Pitfalls Leading into Nervous illness

“Three main pitfalls can lead into nervous illness (anxiety attacks).  They are sensitization, bewilderment, and fear. 

Sensitization is a state in which our nerves react in an exaggerated way to stress; that is, they bring very intense feelings when under stress and they may react this way with alarming swiftness, almost in a flash.

There is no mystery about sensitization. We have all surely felt it in a mild way at the end of a day’s tense work, when our nerves feel on edge and little things upset us too much.

Constant tension alerts nerves to react in a mildly exaggerated way.  It’s not pleasant and we don’t like it.  If it is more severe, we may be alarmed and think that our nerves are in a very bad way indeed.

So much nervous illness is no more than severe sensitization kept alive by bewilderment and fear.

When a person is constantly sensitized and afraid of the state he is in, we say he is nervously ill. Fear must come into the picture to bring this kind of illness. Sensitization alone is not enough, because without fear a body will quickly repair its sensitized state.

Many people are precipitated into nervous illness by the fear induced by some sudden, alarming, yet harmless bodily sensation such as their first unexpected attack of palpitations.  Such an attack can be frightening to a highly strung temperament, especially if it comes at night and there is no one to turn to for comfort and reassurance.  The heart races wildly and the sufferer is sure it will burst.  He usually lies still, afraid to move for fear of further damaging himself.  So, fear arises.

It is only natural to be alarmed by sudden, unexpected, uncomfortable happenings in our body, particularly in the region of our heart.

Fear-Adrenalin-Fear Cycle

Fear causes an additional outpouring of adrenalin, so that a heart already stirred to palpitations becomes further excited, beats even more quickly, and the attack lasts longer.  The sufferer may panic, thinking he is about to die.  His hands sweat, his face burns, his fingers tingle with “pins and needles” while he waits for he knows not what.

The attack eventually stops – it always does – and all may be well for a while. However, having had one frightening experience, he dreads another and for days remains tense and anxious, from time to time feeling his pulse.  If the palpitations do not return, he settles down, loses himself in his work and forgets the incident. 

If, however, he has a second attack, he really is concerned.  Apparently, the wretched thing has come to stay!  Not only is he afraid of palpitating, but he is also in a state of tension, wondering what further alarming experience may yet be in store for him.  It is not long before tension, releasing more and more adrenaline, makes his stomach churn, his hands sweat, and his heart constantly beat quickly.  He becomes even more afraid, and still more adrenalin is released.  In other words, he becomes caught in the fear-adrenaline-fear cycle.

Chapter 5 Selections:

If you have the kind of nervous illness just described, you will notice that, as already mentioned, you have certain symptoms as a fairly constant background to your day, while others come from time to time.

For example, the churning stomach, sweating hands, and rapidly beating heart may be more or less always with you; while fear spasms, palpitations, “missed” heartbeats, pains around the heart, trembling spells, breathlessness, giddiness, nausea come in attacks at intervals.

The constant symptoms are those of sustained tension and fear, hence their chronicity; while the different recurring attacks are the result of varying intensity in sustained fear, hence their periodicity.

‘This is Too Simple for Me’

The treatment of all symptoms depends on a few simple rules. When you first read them you may think, ‘This is too simple for me. It will take something more drastic to cure me.’ In spite of this, you will need to be shown how to apply this simple treatment and may often have to reread instructions.

The principle of treatment can be summarized as:

Facing

Accepting

Floating

Letting time pass

There is nothing mysterious or surprising about this treatment, and yet it is enlightening to see how many people sink deeper into their illness by doing the exact opposite.

Let us look again briefly at the person described in the last chapter, the person afraid of the physical feelings aroused by fear and see if we can pinpoint his own reaction to these symptoms.

First, he became unduly alarmed by his symptoms, examining each as it appeared, “listening in” in apprehension.  He tried to free himself of the unwelcome feelings by tensing himself to meet them or pushing them away, agitatedly seeking occupation to force forgetfulness – in other words, by fighting or running away.

Also, he was bewildered because he could not find cure overnight. He kept looking back and worrying because so much time was passing and he was not yet cured, as if this were an evil spirit that could be exorcised if only he, or the doctor, knew the trick.  He was impatient with time.

Briefly, he spent his time:

Running away, not facing;

Fighting, not accepting;

Arresting and “listening in,” not floating past;

Being impatient with time, not letting time pass

Need we be impressed if he thinks it will take something more drastic than facing, accepting, floating, and letting time pass to cure him?  I don’t think we need.

Now, let us consider how you can cure yourself by facing, accepting, floating, and letting time pass.

Chapter 6 Selections:

First, look at yourself and notice how you are sitting in your chair. I have no doubt that you are tensely shrinking from the feelings within you and yet, at the same time, you are ready to ‘listen in’ in apprehension. I want you to do the exact opposite.

I want you to sit as comfortably as you can, relax to the best of your ability by letting your arms and legs sag into the chair as if charged with lead. In other words, let your body flop in the chair. Now examine and do not shrink from the sensations that have been upsetting you.  I want you to examine each carefully, to analyze and describe it aloud to yourself.

For example, you may say, ‘My hands sweat and tremble. They feel sore…’. This may sound a little silly and you may smile. So much the better.

Begin with the nervous feeling in your stomach, the so-called churning. This may feel like an uneasy fluttering or may bore steadily like a hot poker passing from your stomach to your back.  Do not tensely flinch from it.  Go with it.  Relax and analyze it. 

Now that you have faced and examined it, is it so terrible? If you had arthritis in your wrist, you would be prepared to work with the arthritic pain without becoming too upset. Why regard this churning as something so different from ordinary pain that it can frighten you?

Stop regarding it as some monster trying to possess you. Understand that it is but the working of oversensitized adrenalin-releasing nerves and that by constantly shrinking from it you have stimulated an excessive outflow of adrenalin that has further excited your nerves to produce continual churning.  By your anxiety you are producing the very feelings you dislike so much.

While you examine and analyze this churning, a strange thing may happen: you may find your attention wandering from yourself. This “thing” which seemed so terrible while you stayed tense and flinched from it, may fail to hold your attention for long when you see it for what it is – no more than a strange physical feeling of no great medical significance, and causing no real harm.

Just as A Broken Leg Takes Time to Heal

So, be prepared to accept and live with it for the time being. Accept it as something that will be with you for some time yet – in fact while you recover – but something that will eventually leave you if you are prepared to let time pass and not anxiously watch the churning during it’s passing.

But do not make the mistake of thinking it will go as soon as you cease to fear it.

Your nerves are still sensitized and will take time to heal, just as a broken leg takes time.  However, as you improve and are no longer afraid, and do not try to cure it by controlling it, and are prepared to accept it and work with it presently, you will gradually become more interested in other things and will gradually forget to notice whether it is there or not.  This is the way to recover.

By true acceptance you break the fear-adrenaline-fear cycle.

True Acceptance: The Keystone to Recovery

From this discussion you will appreciate that true acceptance is the keystone to recovery, and before you continue with the examination of your other symptoms, you should make sure that you understand its exact meaning.

I find that some patients complain, ‘I have accepted that churning in my stomach, but it is still there. So, what am I to do now?’  How could they have accepted it while they still complain about it?

Or, as one old man said, ‘After breakfast the churning starts. I can’t just sit there and churn. If I do, I’m exhausted after an hour, so I have to get up and walk around. But I’m too tired to walk around, so what am I to do?’

I said to him, ‘You haven’t really accepted that churning, have you?’

‘Oh yes I have,’ he answered indignantly, ‘I’m not frightened of it anymore.’

But he obviously was. He was afraid that after an hour’s churning he would be exhausted, so he sat tensely dreading its arrival, shrinking from it when it came and worrying about the exhaustion to follow.

Of course the churning, itself a symptom of tension, must inevitably come while so tensely awaited.

I tried to make him understand that he must be prepared to let his stomach churn and to continue reading his paper while it churned.  He must try to loosen that tight hold on himself, literally let his body sag into the chair and go toward, not shrink from, any feeling his body brings him. 

Only by doing so would he be truly accepting.   In this way, and only in this way, would he eventually reach the stage when it would no longer matter whether his stomach churned or not. Then, freed from the stimulus of tension and anxiety, his adrenalin-releasing nerves would gradually calm and the churning would automatically lessen and finally cease.

The Symptoms are Always a Reflection of Your Mood

The symptoms of this type of illness are always a reflection of your mood. However, it is well to remember that it may be some time before your body reacts to the new mood of acceptance and that it may continue for a while to reflect the tense, frightened mood of the preceding weeks, months, or years.

This is one reason why nervous illness can be so bewildering and why this old man was bewildered. He had begun to accept, but when the symptoms did not disappear immediately, he quickly lost heart and became apprehensive again, although trying to convince himself that he was accepting.

It takes time for a body to establish acceptance as a mood and for this to eventually bring peace, just as it took time for fear to become established as continuous tension and anxiety. That is why “letting time pass” is such an important part of your treatment and why I emphasize it again and again.  Time is the answer, but there must be that background of true acceptance while waiting for time to pass.

True acceptance means letting your stomach churn, letting your hands sweat and tremble, letting your heart thump without being too disconcerted by them.  It does not matter if at first you cannot do this calmly – who could?  It may be impossible to be calm at this stage. And you may find that one minute you can accept, the next minute you can’t. Don’t be upset by this – it is normal in the circumstances.

All I ask for at this stage is that you are prepared to try to live and work with your symptoms while they are present.

Floating

To float is just as important as to accept, and it works similar magic.  I could say let ‘float’ and not ‘fight’ be your slogan, because it amounts to that.

Just as a person, floating on smooth water, lets himself be carried this way, that way by the gentle movement of the water, so should the nervously ill let his body “go with” the feelings his nervous reactions bring instead of trying to withdraw from them or force his way through them.

Let me illustrate more clearly the practical application of ‘float.’

A patient had become so afraid of meeting people that she had not entered a shop for months. When asked to make a small purchase she said, ‘I couldn’t go into a shop. I’ve tried but I can’t. The harder I try, the worse I get. If I force myself, I feel I’m paralyzed and can’t put one foot in front of the other. So please don’t ask me to go into a shop.’

In Deep, Cool Water

I told her that she had little hope of succeeding while she tried to force herself in this way. This was the fighting of which I had previously warned her. Then I showed her a trick I show many patients.

I placed my hand on her chest and asked her to move forward against my pressure. When she strained to do this, I pointed out that this was exactly how she had been trying to conquer her illness.

I then asked her to stretch her arms before her, level with her shoulders, and to move them as if swimming breaststroke. I also asked her to imagine at the same time that she was swimming forward in deep, cool water. I could feel her relax immediately.

If [you fear water], don’t upset yourself by trying to cope with the thought of deep, cool water. Choose some other way to ‘float’ that may appeal to you. For instance, the woman I have just been talking about later admitted she did not like the thought of water, so she imagined she was on a cloud floating through the door.

Masterly Inactivity

Masterly inactivity, a well-known phrase, is another way to describe floating.  It means to give up the struggle to stop holding tensely onto yourself, trying to control your fear, trying to ‘do something about it’ while subjecting yourself to constant self-analysis.

The average person, tense with battle, has an innate aversion to practicing masterly activity and letting go. He vaguely thinks that were he to do this, he would lose control over the last vestige of his willpower and his house of cards would tumble.

As one young man said, ‘I feel I must stand on guard. If I were to let go, I’m sure something would snap. It is absolutely necessary for me to keep control and hold myself together’

When he was obliged to talk to strangers, he would dig his nails into his palms while he tried to control his trembling body and conceal his state of nervous tension. He would watch the clock anxiously, wondering how much longer he could keep up this masquerade without cracking.

Loosen Your Attitude

It is to such tense, controlled, nail-digging people that I say, ‘practice masterly inactivity and let go’ Loosen your attitude.  Don’t be too concerned because you are tense and cannot relax. The very act of being prepared to accept your tenseness relaxes your mind, and relaxation of body gradually follows. You don’t have to strive for relaxation. You have to wait for it.

When a patient says, ‘I have tried so hard all day to be relaxed,’ surely he has had a day of striving, not of relaxation.  Let your body find its own level without controlling it, directing it.  Believe me, if you do this you will not crack. You will not lose control of yourself.

In your tense effort to control yourself you have been releasing more and more adrenalin and so further exciting your organs to produce the very sensations from which you have been trying to escape.

Summary:

Float past tension and fear

Float past unwelcome suggestions

Float, don’t fight

Go through the Peak of Experience with utter acceptance

Let more time pass

*

Analyzing Fear. Two Separate Fears

Cure lies in desensitization, and there is no doubt that the key to desensitization lies in learning how to cope with panic.

Recurring panic, more than any other nervous symptom, helps to keep nervous illness alive. To cope with panic, it is important for the nervously ill person to understand that when he panics, he feels not one fear, as he supposes, but two separate fears.

Because his nerves are sensitized, one fear follows the other so swiftly it is as if the two fears are one.

With each wave of panic there are always two separate fears involved. I will call these the first and second fear.

The importance of recognizing these two separate fears cannot be overestimated, because although the nervously ill person, as a result of sensitization, may have no direct control over the first fear, with understanding and practice he can learn how to control second fear, and it is this second fear that is keeping the first fear alive, keeping him sensitized, keeping him nervously ill.

First Fear

Everyone experiences first fear from time to time.   It is the fear that comes reflexively, almost automatically, in response to some threatened danger.   It is normal in intensity – we understand it, we accept it.  We cope with the danger and the fear passes.

However, the flash of first fear that comes to a sensitized person in response to danger is not normal in intensity.

It can be so overwhelmingly intense, so electric in its swiftness, so out of proportion to the danger causing it that a sensitized person cannot readily dismiss it.  Indeed, he usually recoils from it, and as he does this he adds a second flash of fear to the first flash.

He adds fear of the first flash.

Indeed, he may be much more concerned with the physical feeling of panic than with the original danger.  And because that old bogy, sensitization, prolongs the first flash, the second flash may actually seem to join it.  This is why the two fears so often feel as one.

A flash of first fear may follow no more than the sudden impact of a cold blast of wind.  It may follow merely some mildly unpleasant memory; it may come in response to a thought only vaguely understood, or, as I mentioned earlier, it may seem to come ‘out of the blue’. 

‘Oh my goodness!  Here it is again!’

A nervously ill person has only to think of being trapped for first fear to flash instantly.  To this he immediately adds plenty of second fear as he thinks, ‘Oh, my goodness! Here it is again! I can’t stand it. I’ll make a fool of myself in front of all these people.  Let me out of here. Quickly! Quickly!’.

With each ‘Quickly!’ he adds more and more panic, more and more tension, and as the tension mounts, naturally the panic mounts in intensity, until he is never quite sure just how intense the panic can become or what crisis it may bring. 

No mounting panic

If he were prepared to sit in his seat, relax his body to the best of his ability – let it sag, flop into his seat – and let the panic flash, let it do its very worst, let it flash right through him without withdrawing tensely from it, there would be no mounting tension, no mounting panic.

His sensitized body may continue to flash panic for a while, but the panic would not mount, and he would be able to sit there and see the function through.

It is bombardment by second fear, day after day, week after week, for one excuse or another that keeps nerves alerted, always triggered to fire that first fear so sensitively, flashing electrically when under stress.

Unmask that second fear

How important it is to learn how to spot second fear and send it packing.  Recognizing second fear and coping with it is the way to desensitization, the way to recovery.

Recognizing second fear is made easier when we realize that it can usually be prefixed by ‘Oh my goodness!’ and ‘What if…?’. 

‘Oh my goodness, it took four capsules to get me to sleep last night.  What if four don’t work tonight?’

‘Oh my goodness, what if I get worse, not better?’

So many Oh my Goodnesses and so many What Ifs make up that second fear.

All the symptoms that come with stress, the pounding heart, churning stomach, weak feelings, etc. can be called first fears because they, too, come unbidden like the flash of fear that comes in answer to danger; and to these symptoms the nervously ill person certainly adds plenty of second fear, certainly adds many Oh, my goodnesses, many What ifs, more than enough to keep his fires well burning.

By analyzing fear and its symptoms in this way and seeing them as physical feelings that conform to a set pattern and are of no great medical significance, you unmask fear and with it your own illness, and only a bogy remains.

And when you decide to accept this bogy and add no more second fear (or as little as you can manage) the road to recovery lies open before you.  Now, even with great success at learning how to cope with second fear, it takes time for desensitization.

The nervously ill person must understand and accept that his sensitized body will flash first fear from time to time for some time to come.

To face and accept one’s nervous symptoms without adding second fear and to let time pass for recovery – it works miracles if you are prepared to do just this.

But it is not easy to face, accept, and let time pass.  It is especially difficult to let time pass because you may already have let so much time pass in suffering and despair that asking you to let more time pass may seem an impossible demand.   It is difficult but necessary.

Also, don’t think I underestimate the severity of your panic.  I know how severe it can be and I also know that even with the help of daily sedation and the best of intentions and determination to accept it, you may think yourself too exhausted to do so.

*

[At this point, Weekes goes on to describe that in certain extreme situations hospitalization and “sedatives” may be required until the patient can recover enough to begin following these guidelines].

[Many passages follow detailing various well-known panic symptoms and she comments on each symptom.  She outlines how to squash second fear when you experience palpitations, slow heartbeat, “missed” heartbeats, “trembling turns”, inability to take a deep breath, throat lump, dizziness, etc.  I am skipping to the section on eating / difficulty swallowing.  I chose to include this section because it’s my biggest problem.  Reading her text in this section helped me two years ago when I stopped eating for several weeks]

Nausea

Eating may be a problem. You have probably lost weight and feel nauseated at the sight of food.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that because you feel nauseated and are under stress, your food is doing you little good and that therefore you need not eat much.

Even when eaten in these conditions food will nourish you, although it may take longer than normal to digest.  Malnutrition and anemia can bring symptoms like yours, so you must eat enough.

If you have eaten poorly for weeks, your stomach may be unable at first to hold a normal-sized meal. If so, take small meals frequently.  Eat egg flips and drink plenty of milk.  Also, take a daily dose of vitamins.

Difficulty in Swallowing

The lump in the throat described earlier may be most troublesome at mealtime.  The sufferer is sure he cannot swallow solid food, or at least finds this difficult.

‘I’ll never get it down!’

I keep biscuits [crackers or dry cookies] in my office especially for such a patient.  Biscuits are dry, and at the sight of one the patient usually recoils. When I ask him to chew one, he says, ‘I couldn’t swallow a biscuit! I’d never get it down!’

I remind him that I asked him to chew, not swallow. Reluctantly he bites and chews.  After a while I say, “Now remember, I want you only to chew. Don’t swallow.”

But already he has swallowed some of it. As soon as the moistened, softened biscuit reaches the back of his tongue, his swallowing reflexes take over and at least some of the biscuit is on its way.

You need not worry about trying to swallow, simply keep chewing. The swallowing will look after itself as the food is carried backward. And it will eventually find its way backward in spite of your nervous resistance. If you keep chewing, the food will all eventually disappear.

Losing Weight: Keep off those scales

Provided you are practicing accepting and letting time pass and are eating your meals, especially that last extra bit you don’t want, your weight is not important. 

People with nervous illness place unnecessary significance on losing weight. They view their protruding bones with growing alarm, wondering just how far the fading-away process can go before they fall to pieces completely.  [Second Fear].

They haunt the bathroom scales, eyes glued to the dial, while they try to jiggle out a few extra ounces.  Cover your scales and resist all temptation to stand on them until you are so fat that you think its time to diet.

It is interesting to note the direct and yet temporary effect of emotional stress on appetite. I have seen a distressed person gag at the sight of food, only to devour it ravenously an hour later after hearing good news.

The body made thin by fear is not diseased and is waiting to recover lost weight as soon as you will pass the food down to it. 

So place no importance on your wasted looks, your “poor thin body”. Eat up and forget those scales. Even when some cheerful friend says, “good heavens, you are thinner than ever!” still resist the temptation to step onto the scales.

Why not think, ‘I may look awful today, but nervous illness is not a disease. As soon as I am a little better, I will put on more weight. In the meantime, I’ll eat up, even if I have to chew the food for hours. And I’ll float past my neighbors comments.’

Keep Occupied

It is essential that you be occupied while awaiting cure. However, I must warn you against feverishly seeking occupation in order to forget yourself.

This is running away from fear, and you can’t run far from fear. I want you to be occupied while facing your symptoms and to accept the possibility of their return from time to time during recovery. There is a world of difference between these two approaches.

Every short respite from fear helps to calm your nerves so that they become less and less responsive to stimulation and your sensations less and less intense, until they are only a memory.”

*

This is a good place to stop.   The other night after I had a severe attack, I re-read some of these passages and found myself laughing at how I did everything completely wrong. 

She says not to worry about how much time is passing.  I remember saying, “This has been going on again since November!”.   

But again, it’s very hard to avoid feeling that way while in the heat of the moment.  Personally, since my anxiety is apparently here to stay, I think I might actually write this in a notebook and tape it to my fridge:

“Face

Accept

Float

Let time pass”

-ZeroSpace

***Buy the book “Hope and Help for your Nerves” here: https://www.amazon.com/Hope-Help-Nerves-Claire-Weekes/dp/0451167228

An excellent article about Claire Weeks from the Syndey Morning Herald: https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/health-and-wellness/face-accept-float-let-time-pass-claire-weekes-anxiety-cure-holds-true-decades-on-20190917-p52s2w.html

All Claire Weekes Publications: https://claire-weekes-publications.myshopify.com/

Visit my Home Page.

-ZeroSpace