Acid Biography

A friend asks about that "fifth acid trip" from the last post. What was that about? I find it handy, when I think about my drug history, to connect it with music. The suits are right; those irreverent, subversive, rock and rollers of the past, and their present-day kin, really did advocate the use of mind-altering substances, no matter what they said at press conferences. But for me, the tone of the drug culture changed, from within me and from without, around the turn of the decade from the sixties to the early seventies. I was walking in the the desert, reading Carlos Casteneda and looking for the Oneness of the Creator; I was also listening to the Beatles, smoking weed, tripping on the colors and the wavy walls and rocks, looking for the Spirit that Tim Leary said we could find if we would just let the old ways of perception fall off our Western shoulders. For me, 1972 was a critical year to turn 18 and make the decision: drop out or mellow out and learn to take it from the man? I went for the mellow, so I started doing less-spiritual drugs such as coke and pills, drinking beers and going to parties, just to forget my problems: the draft, girls (or lack of them), a job, a future. I knew it was a waste of time but I had to look like I cared and it hurt; it was painful to live a capitalist lie so I needed recreational anethesia. From the positive, spiritual outlook of the Beatles I turned to the real deal of the workingman's Stones, who didn't pretend to Godhead but celebrated the dark passions of a pointless life, whose only solace was the ability to escape from it temporarily in debauchery. I went for it, and it was pretty nice for a while, like twenty years.

So there you have it. From Beatles to Stones, Mods to Rockers. Along in there I realized that a spiritual quest was a waste of time in an insane spiritless age, the Atomic/cold War age, when the spiritual was a refuge for those who couldn't handle the real. With enough substances I could handle it, so I didn't need the seemingly irrelevant spirit of Transcendent Perception. I am only just getting it back, just in time, I think