| 9-26-01 So yesterday was one of the first days in a while that I did not write an entry. Why? I think I was burned out. Feeling dead. There wasn't enough room in my brain to put a few words together. Like trying to start a fire with two sticks when you don't even have two sticks. Today we had another lecture at work from senior management. It definitely sounds like people are going to be laid off. We'll probably know how many & who by the end of next week, if not mid-week. I've got a serious vibe I going to be on that list. Probably a good hint is that I have had hardly any work to do in the past two month. Oh well. I'm not upset. Even though there are hardly any jobs out there. What can I do? Hopefully, I'll make the best of it and spend a lot of time making some art. The last time I was unemployed I finished writing my novel. I don't have a book in the works now, but I'm sure I can invent a nice big project on which to work. Although I hope I won't be unemployed for eight months like a friend of mine who had the exact same job as me and couldn't find work until just recently. This might be an interesting time to discuss the time I took LSD. I only did so once; it was in college. I thought of it today because I read a very odd, hard to understand, but poetic article in Artext magazine about drugs. Rem Koolhaas, famous designer/architect contributed to an article (written by Paul Foss) full of grad-school like jargon that seems to be trying to say that there is something noble (yet potentially dangerous) about drug addiction. It driven by a desire "to fly to a world of pure sensation, or rapture, totally free of higher cognitive functioning, i.e., to inhabit the body from the inside - is so ambitious that to be realized, it can never be openly stated…[it is] a utopian suspension of barriers…" Of course, Brave New World attempts to demonstrate that using drugs (to the point of incapacitation or even satiation) is enough to keep people politically inactive. Drugs may be subversive because they are illegal and doing drugs demonstrates a claim of freedom from state control, the recognition that governments and laws don't necessarily know what truth is…but it doesn't do anything to change the laws that take away freedom. So, what happened? I was living in a beautiful old mansion with five other people I didn't know until I moved in. I had my own room, a huge rectangular room that used to be the living room. You entered my room through tall, carved, mahogany, sliding double doors. To the left were French doors that opened to the front porch, straight ahead was an unusable but elegant fireplace, and far to the right was a large single picture window looking out onto the backyard. The ceiling was very high and was bordered by ornate wooden moldings. I had covered my walls with posters of new wave bands like The Jesus and Mary Chain and Joy Division, some drawings, and miscellaneous weird crap. One day, my good friend (wonder what he's up to these days) Brian and I came into some acid and decided to try one hit each. It turned out to be quite powerful stuff. I remember the upside was quite fantastic. For the first four hours, I began to have beautiful sensory hallucinations. Brian and I sat in the room and just looked around watching colors swirling, coming to life, changing shape. I remember going to the bathroom, and the walls seemed to be emanating gentle waves of fog. I was sitting in a comfortable lazy-boy chair, at the peak of the trip, when I felt like I began to levitate, to rise up from the chair and float in the center of the room. I was slowing rotating in space until my eyes were caught by this brightly colored pastel drawing I had hanging on my wall. The primary colors of the drawing projected like a rainbow from the wall and coalesced into a perfect diamond hanging in space just in front of me. Beams of colors glinted in all directions, and it was the most beautiful object I had ever seen in my life. Soon after this, the down side began. I'll talk about that tomorrow. |
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