Healing Through Poison

The potential therapeutic value of psilocybin (the primary compound found in hallucinogenic mushrooms) is currently receiving scientific support nearly three decades after legal issues first led to the abandonment of legitimate scholarly research with hallucinogenic compounds. I have long been interested in the currently underground enterprise of psychedelic therapy and even aspire to work professionally in this field (pending substantial legal changes) in the future. Almost one year ago today, I was fortunate enough to gain an 'illegitimate' experience with assisting someone in obtaining therapeutic value from psychedelics.

I first met Dan at the “Gathering of the Vibes” music festival in Bridgeport, CT last summer. He was camped out next to my group of friends and we all quickly accepted him into our group due to the unfortunate set of circumstances he found himself in. Dan was supposed to arrive at the three-day festival with a few friends of his own who were traveling in a separate vehicle. Unfortunately, they had been apprehended by the authorities before gaining access to the campgrounds after being caught with a sizable quantity of marijuana. Dan was nonetheless determined to stay and enjoy as much of the experience as he could despite having arrived at this strange venue without the comfort of his associates.

Dan watched a few memorable music performances with my friends and I during the first night of the festival, but eventually decided to head back to the campsite without us. He subsequently decided to purchase and consume a couple grams of ‘magic mushrooms’ despite a lack of prior experience with psychedelic drugs. I would have strongly advised against this course of action had I been around before he ingested the fungi, given that he was in a strange place and with people he was generally unfamiliar with. To make matters worse, by the time my friends and I returned to camp, we were all getting ready to turn in for the night; only 20 minutes or so after Dan had dosed himself. The cardinal rule of psychedelic use is to take heed of the set and setting before ingestion; with set referring to one’s current state of mind, and setting referring to the physical environment one is in. In Dan’s case, his set and setting that night were far from ideal, especially for a first-time hallucinogen user.

I conferred with Dan for a short while after learning of his recent ill-informed experiment in order to check on his mental state. He seemed relatively stable at the time (almost an hour after ingestion), so I then proceeded to nobly attempt a short slumber. After napping for about 20 minutes or so, I woke up to hear Dan muttering to himself directly outside my tent. I soon became acutely aware that he was not doing well at all. He was in the throes of what is colloquially referred to as a ‘bad trip.' I got out of my tent and approached him with a measure of respect and caution given the fragile state I knew he was in.

“Having a rough time man?” I casually inquired.

“Do you hear that man talking?” he asked me with noticeable paranoia in his voice.

“I don’t hear anybody in particular talking right now Dan, but I can see how the various sounds around us may seem jumbled and confusing to you.”

“But he is talking to me!”

Dan was experiencing intense audio hallucinations of some man's voice directly addressing him and was understandably scared shitless by it. He had completely lost his grip on reality and therefore could not grasp the concept that his experience was the direct result of his intoxication. I have worked with psychotic individuals in the past, and it was clear to me that Dan was in the midst of a full-blown psychotic episode.

“I am leaving here right now,” he then told me as primordial fear flushed over his face.

“I don’t think that is a good idea in your condition Dan.” “Just remember that all the scary shit you are experiencing right now will disappear in a few short hours.” “I will stay with you the entire time in case you need my help.”

The empathy and caution I took in my approach to dealing with Dan seemed sufficient to dissuade him from wandering off and potentially harming himself or others (he later mentioned in passing a desire to kill himself). I encouraged him to sit in a chair nearby and to talk to me whenever he felt the need. I also took pains to express to him that I understood what he was going through. The truth was, however, that I really did not comprehend the madness swirling in his head. The most difficult experience I ever had with psychedelics did not even come close in comparison to the impaired reality testing Dan was experiencing. All of his inner-demons had banded together and were coming out to haunt him in the worst ways imaginable.

I observed Dan’s insanity for what seemed like an eternity for me, so I don’t even want to contemplate how long that period felt to him. I observed him engage in dialogues with various castigating voices in his head. He conversed with a bitchy ex-girlfriend, his mother, and the mysterious man that had first appeared to him. The most trying part of this process from my end was Dan's new obsession for keeping time, which he eventually became totally consumed by. This was certainly an unintended consequence of my earlier reassurances that his experience would be over in a relatively determined time-frame. At one point, he was checking his watch consistently, sometimes more than once a minute; each time, desperately hoping to see if the critical time-frame I had informed him of would be up. My patience for his new obsession soon began to wear thin and it also became clear to me that his time-keeping was doing him much more harm than good.

“You should probably give your watch to me for now.” “I think it is making your situation worse.”

This suggestion did not go over well initially. Dan was wholly unprepared to give up whatever shred of security his sense of linear time was affording him. Eventually however, he conceded to hand over the watch. This intervention seemed to at least provide subtle relief. Ironically though, my own attention to the time factor was adversely affecting me in that I began to question whether or not Dan truly was ever going to ‘come down’ from this psychotic episode. My concern peaked around the fifth hour of his intoxication; the point where copious amounts of prior experience had taught me one should no longer be in the acute intoxication phase and should therefore be in a fairly stable mental state. He was not even close to this point.

Over the next half hour or so, Dan did thankfully begin to show some signs of being slightly less frightened by his experience, although he was still hearing voices and displaying many other symptoms of psychosis. Although still mildly concerned for his welfare, I eventually felt secure enough to leave him to his own devices and once again nobly attempted to sleep.

The next morning, Dan was still feeling the residue from the mushroom intoxication and recounted having been significantly impaired for a number of hours after I left him the previous night. I continued to befriend Dan over the next two days of the festival and was amazed by how his brush with insanity had profoundly affected him in a positive way. For almost 48 straight hours straight, a notebook and pen never left his side as he feverishly jotted down notes, reflections, and remembrances from that fateful night. He soon admitted to me that his first mushroom trip had been the most important experience of his life, even despite the horrors he had encountered. Unfortunately, I did not get into great detail with Dan about the insights he had obtained, but suffice it to say, he felt as though a number of personal issues had been cleared up and a new perspective on his life had emerged.

The recent promising results from psilocybin research (e.g., Griffiths, et.al.) have established the legitimate therapeutic potential of psychedelic mushrooms. In these studies, however, the substance is administered under tightly controlled conditions with healthy volunteers. In contrast, Dan’s experience demonstrates how, even in less-than-ideal circumstances, with the right assistance, even a bad experience with psychedelics can be potentially therapeutic. Even still, safe and controlled use in a clinical setting with available professional help is obviously the most preferable method for obtaining the desired therapeutic outcome with this substance. This is why psychedelic research needs all the support it can get. Visit Maps.org now and check out all the amazing studies they are supporting. You or someone you love may very well be able to benefit from controlled use of such compounds in the future.

~Wolf

Dead Child? Heal By Deluding Yourself

Here in Boston, a grieving bullshitter named Kathi Meyer has been making the rounds on the local news stations. She is the guilt-ridden parent of Taylor Meyer—a seventeen year-old high school senior who last year was found dead in a pond after she passed out face down in it after drinking in the woods with friends. Ms. Meyer feels partially responsible for her daughter’s death because she says she failed to see the “warning signs.” She especially regrets not checking Taylor’s Facebook page, where she would have seen pictures of her daughter drinking at parties, which presumably would have induced her to attempt corrective action regarding Taylor's behavior. But because we were once seventeen also, we know this would've been a dubious proposition.

From the sound of it, Ms. Meyer—a single mother—seems to have had a typical teenage daughter who did what teenagers occasionally do: drink. I don’t think anyone can reasonably blame the woman for what happened to her daughter, even though she herself does, which is highly unfortunate. In reality, the only difference between Taylor Meyer and the average young drinker is that Taylor was unlucky enough to stumble into a pond and drown while intoxicated. The truth is, Taylor Meyer could have been any one of us in our younger days. (Raise your hand if at one point or another you were so shitfaced or high that if you passed out in a lake you could not be sure whether you'd wake up or not.)

So what’s my beef with Kathi Meyer? Like many anguished parents of dead children, Ms. Meyer has become a self-righteous, self-deluding woman whose egoistic actions have been interpreted by the media and everyone else as an exercise in public virtue. Since her daughter’s death last year, she has gone to over a dozen local high schools to admonish teens against the dangers of underage drinking, all the while receiving praise for her "selfless" efforts. Why has she been doing this? I’ll let the woman speak for herself: “I could have sat in my shell and had nothing good come from this, but Taylor wouldn’t want that.” Typical self-centered baloney from a sanctimonious grieving parent. Ninety-nine out one hundred assertions about what a dead person would or wouldn’t want are claims whose speakers have completely self-serving motives.

You see, Ms. Meyer's actions continue a trend whereby the parents of dead children become visible social activists against whatever it is that killed their children. Drinking, drugs, head injury, rabies, etc. This activism is symptomatic of an often unjustifiably guilty conscience, as well as the desire to make sense of the seemingly senseless. By translating a child's death into a cause, the grief-stricken parent attempts to place this personal and random tragedy into a structured narrative in which the tragedy is made meaningful. Rather than accept the death as a freak occurence brought forth by the whims of chance, the parent uses it as a point of departure in endeavoring to "save" others from the same fate. In this way, the child morphs into a martyr, a fallen champion of a cause she never sanctioned. Regardless, she will be made a savior who died so that others could live. It is this delusional rationale which so often drives the grieving parent.

If Ms. Meyer wants to misguidedly hold herself responsible for what happened and try to assuage her guilt by “saving” other teenagers, that’s her issue; but don’t tell me this woman is dripping with magnanimity because she’s now taking the time to warn other people’s kids about drinking. Where were Ms. Meyer and her anti-alcohol speeches before her daughter died? Oh that’s right: when Taylor was alive her mother didn’t have a seriously crippled ego in need of absolution. As such, the safety of the very kids she now lectures at schools was not a priority, as the dangers of underage drinking barely registered on her radar. Only was it after her daughter died that Ms. Meyer so nobly took it upon herself to crusade against such "reckless" behavior. This woman is free to do as she pleases, but let’s not pretend that this speaking tour of hers is pro bono work. The schools don’t pay her, but she’s getting compensation just the same: the alleviation of (misplaced) guilt—a guilt that will never totally go away.

-Max

Jesus Christ: Messiah. Son of God. Bathroom Attendant?

From the May 26 Galveston County, Texas Daily News:

GALVESTON — Eight months after being displaced by Hurricane Ike, Tracy Ward found hope in a most peculiar place.

She asks her guests to sit on the toilet facing the wall tile above the bathtub.

“Do you see him?” she saked. [sic]

“Him” means Jesus Christ. She points at spots on a centerpiece of tile.

“There, you can see his beard, and a cave behind him. If you close your eyes and reopen them, you can see people walking up behind him.”

Ward’s eyes light up joyfully.

“Chances are, it could be that there’s something I’m supposed to heed,” Ward, a Baptist, said. “I try to stay good.”

…“Maybe we are being told something, and maybe we aren’t listening to it,” she said. “I’m hoping to share this blessing with everyone.

“I’ve always been a helpful person. Now, it’s more like ‘you can take my last 50 cents.’”

I know you must be shocked by this because I certainly was: Galveston has a newspaper. This implies that the city has at least a partially literate population. Who would have thought?

Ah yes, the old Jesus-appeared-to-me-while-I-was-on-the-toilet mode of divine intervention. We’ve all been there. One morning, after a wake-and-bake session, you eat seven or eight pancakes for breakfast while washing them down with Wild Turkey when all of a sudden Jesus beckons from the shitter. There, in the privacy of your bathroom, Christ reveals himself in a tile just above your soap-dish. Hallelujah.

Is this woman for real? I hope not, but I fear so. Instead of seeing the “apparition” for what it is—an utterly insignificant happenstance novelty—this lady is taking it 100 percent seriously. My favorite quote from the article: “Chances are, it could be that there’s something I’m supposed to heed.” Yeah, like how about, clean your fucking bathroom. Get some Windex and a rag and wipe that Mildew Messiah off the wall.

The really frightening part is that she is only one of thousands of Americans who have claimed to have found Jesus, literally. In a bathroom, in a window pane, in a grilled cheese sandwich, and other places no sane god would reveal himself in. This readiness to believe in the divine significance of fluke shapes in everyday objects surely qualifies as a mental disorder. It’s bad enough this woman thought she found Jesus while dropping a deuce, but it’s worse that she agreed to be interviewed about it. Clearly this woman and those like her are not well.

What this indicates to me is that subconsciously, some of these yahoos know that the Second Coming isn’t happening in their lifetimes, or ever. As a result, when chance proffers odd, vaguely anthropomorphic-looking images in commonplace objects, these ecclesiastical whackjobs create their own Second Coming by seeing Jesus in anything that their imaginations will allow—a mildly subtle way of saying, “Christ is everywhere.” Indeed he could be if only we had enough bathrooms.

-Max

How Small Is Kim Jong-il's Penis?

(No case in contemporary foreign diplomacy better highlights men’s insecurities about their manhood than that of North Korea’s petit leader, Kim Jong-il. Though he is of very small stature and his country is a marginal player in international politics, Kim—who wears platform shoes to appear taller— talks tough, but I say he doesn’t have the cajones to back up his words.)

As a close follower of politics I can appreciate the late comedian George Carlin’s take on international relations. Carlin formulated what he called the Bigger Dick Foreign Policy Theory, which states that men—especially world leaders—are insecure about their manhood, so they often go to war over it. He summed it up this way: “What? They have bigger dicks? Bomb them!” Case in point: the Gulf War. Saddam Hussein questioned the size of George H.W. Bush’s manhood by invading Kuwait, an American ally. This transgression was met with overwhelming military force, ostensibly demonstrating that in fact, Bush was bigger—and perhaps hairier—than Saddam.

Today’s ideal Bigger Dick theory case study is five-foot three inch tall North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il—a.k.a. Lil’ Kim—who desperately wants to assert his own nonexistent well-endowedness by threatening all kinds of crazy shit to anyone who so much as looks at him the wrong way. His outhouse of a country is a Stalinist police state with a cult of personality centered on him and his dead father who is still president of the country. You read that correctly. In 1998, Kim Il-Sung was posthumously named “Eternal President” of North Korea, which is why his midget son does not use the title “President” as his father did when he was alive and running this toilet.

Recently, as you may have heard, a nuclear bomb test was conducted by Lil’ Kim and the North Koreans. (Didn’t they win Making the Band one year?) This is serious business. Having nuclear weapons is the international relations equivalent of having a ten-inch penis. It can be a real conversation ender. Know what I mean? Like, when all the countries are at a party pounding Miller High Life and taking hits of opium that Thailand was nice enough to bring, things can get rowdy. Next thing you know, Brazil starts bragging about its penis size, and then Spain and Australia both take exception by asserting their own bigness when all of a sudden, wham! Pakistan unzips and pulls out a foot-long nuclear dick and ends the discussion right there.

Unfortunately for Kim, he has a relatively small arsenal of nuclear weapons compared to the countries that matter. The test he conducted this week naturally prompted an international outcry, along with a promise from the U.S. that it will inspect ships bound for North Korea to look for materials that could be used to make weapons of mass destruction. Kim responded in his usual batshit-crazy way by saying that ship inspections and other sanctions would mean war. He even went so far as to threaten a “powerful military strike” in retaliation, presumably against South Korea. The North is still bitter over America’s successful military defense of the South in the Korean War, when the U.S. went Lorena Bobbitt on the North and totally emasculated it. But by now the North’s dick has been sewed back on, and Kim has gotten the country some Enzyte (nukes) to boot. That’s why he’s acting so brazen and announcing that he’ll retaliate militarily even if just sanctions are levied against the North—an act tantamount to a declaration of war, according to Kim. But he should know that when the U.S. declares war on a country, it doesn’t go half-assed. It doesn’t declare war via sanctions. No, the United States either goes to war by dropping lots and lots of bombs now and asking questions later, or it doesn’t go to war at all. When the Americans declare war on you, you will know it.

The truth in all of this is that the Dear Leader’s threats are nothing but empty rhetoric. You see, his problem is that the U.S. military is light-years better that his large but still chicken-shit army of goose-stepping tenderfoots. Furthermore, Kim understands that if he ever attacked South Korea, the American military response would be one thousand times greater than his paintball foray across the Demilitarized Zone. Now, this is the part where some national security “experts” say that a U.S. strike would be problematic because the North’s nukes give it a deterrent capability. Fuck that. The dictator realizes that if he ever detonated a nuke on foreign soil, North Korea would cease to exist as a state because the U.S. would simply not tolerate it. Within minutes of a North Korean nuclear strike, Pyongyang would be blasted into the thermosphere. The thing this, Kim knows this, and he knows that the U.S. knows that he knows this. Therefore, he also knows he can’t use his nukes unless he wants to bring upon death and destruction to himself and his country, which he doesn’t. He loves himself too much and also the phony adoration that gets heaped upon him on a daily basis. Besides, when you’ve pretty much perfected the art of counterfeiting U.S. money as Kim has, why throw it all away over a few boatloads of centrifuges and drums of yellowcake uranium?

Basically, Lil’ Kim is hoping to god that by acting like an unstable and militant fucktard and telling everyone how big his penis is, other countries won’t ask him to pull his pants down so they can verify the extent of his manliness. If they do ask to see Jong’s dong, he will either have to show it, or do nothing and remain zipped, thereby demonstrating that he was bluffing all along. If the U.S. and friends do call Kim out, he won’t dare show his manhood because it is a small, frightened, shriveled, turtle-head of a wee-wee packing no punch whatsoever.

-Max

"Breaking Bad" Smokes the Competition

There are very few shows on television I consider worthy of my attention. In fact, you could count the number of these programs on one hand—specifically the hand of Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown. Two of these “shows” are Red Sox and Patriots games, so that should tell you what I think about the state of American television.

But in this vast and barren wasteland of cookie-cutter sitcoms, self-righteous talk-show hosts, and mind-blowingly idiotic reality TV shows with patently absurd premises, there is Breaking Bad on AMC. Breaking Bad—created by former X-Files producer Vince Gilligan—is quite simply the best show on television. How do I know this if I don’t watch other “hit” TV shows? Recall your Philosophy 101 course and St. Anselm’s ontological argument. Remember how he spoke of “that than which nothing greater can be conceived?” He was referring to Breaking Bad. So was Plato when he wrote of the ideal Form of a television drama. So who am I to question the wisdom of a monk and a philosopher?

Now nearing the end of its second season, Breaking Bad centers on the life of Walter White (Bryan Cranston), a fifty year-old high school chemistry teacher who is totally overqualified for his job. In the first episode of season one he learns he has terminal lung cancer. Worried that his pregnant wife Skyler (Anna Gun) and teenage son Walter Jr. (R.J. Mitte) who has mild cerebral palsy will be in dire financial straits once he is gone, he hooks up with his former slacker student and druggie Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) to cook crystal meth and sell it on the streets. Eventually, Walter is persuaded by his family to try to fight the cancer by undergoing a very expensive and what is at first a none-too-promising treatment regimen. Ironically, Walter’s decision to fight for his life indirectly puts his life in danger because in his eyes, he has no choice but to keep cooking meth with Jesse to pay for his treatment. All the while, he becomes more deeply involved in the dangerous world of drug dealing, and stares into the face of death on a few occasions.

The penultimate episode of season two aired on Sunday, and it featured the most powerful scene in the entire series thus far. I know I’ve already summarized the basic plot of the show for those who aren’t familiar, but this scene is worth recounting. If you haven’t seen it yet, this paragraph contains spoilers, so consider yourself warned. At the beginning of the episode Walter sells almost forty pounds of meth he and Jesse made for $1.2 million (causing him to miss the birth of his daughter), but he is reluctant to give Jesse his share because he is genuinely concerned that he will blow it on drugs. This leads Jesse to tell his recently relapsed girlfriend Jane—who introduced him to heroin—all about what he and Walter have been up to, prompting her to call Walter and threaten to tell the police about his meth-making if he didn’t give Jesse his half, which Walter then does. But Walter returns to Jesse’s apartment soon after, apparently to have a serious talk about his drug use. He finds Jesse and Jane in bed, both too high on smack to wake up. Suddenly Jane—who is lying on her back—starts vomiting and choking. Walter immediately rushes over to her side of the bed and extends his arms to turn her over when…he pauses. And slowly he withdraws his hands and proceeds to stand there and watch her choke for what seems like an eternity until she is choking no more. He covers his mouth, even shedding a tear at his necessary inaction.

While it was likely that Jane never would have gone to the police, she knew too much just the same; plus she was a drug addict, and as Walter’s buyer told him in the previous episode, “You can never trust a drug addict.” Walter is too smart and pragmatic to let a fluke opportunity such as that pass him by. It was him or her. Advantage Walter. He is a survivor. What was remarkable about this scene was that it managed to be so powerful and badass without a word said or a shot fired. The lesson here is plain enough: Walter is scrupulous only when he can afford to be so. The rest of the time he is practical.

What I love most about Breaking Bad is the rampant depravity in just about every episode. The show’s very name is a colloquialism from the American south which means “going wrong.” Indeed, Walter breaks bad out of sheer necessity. Jesse has already broken bad by the time Walter teams up with him. And obviously the shady characters these two encounter in their dealings aren’t saints, including their newfound shyster lawyer Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) who’s as sardonic and funny as he is crooked. Even Walter’s family is not immune. His wife Skyler seems to be on the verge of having an affair with her boss. His sister-in-law is a chronic shoplifter, maybe even a kleptomaniac. Oh and by the way, Walter’s brother-in-law Hank (Dean Norris), with whom he has a tense relationship on occasion, is a DEA agent who happened to come upon Walter’s product in a bust. It turns out the DEA is astonished almost to the point of admiration at the purity of his crystal, and naturally they set about tracking down this mythical meth-man they know only by his alias: “Heisenberg,” so chosen by Walter after the quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg. It was he who formulated the famous uncertainty principle, which states that it is impossible to measure simultaneously both the position of a particle and its momentum. The more that is known about one of the properties, the less can be known about the other. Walter's choice of alias is quite instructive.

Does all this sound implausible? Maybe on paper, but the compelling storyline and its subplots are made convincing and brought to life by a skilled cast led by the estimable Emmy-winning Cranston, who makes Walter White the most dynamic character on television, fictitious or otherwise. He is extremely intelligent and mild-mannered, but as viewers know, Walter has actually had to kill two drug dealers because they were probably going to kill him. Despite the death he encounters with almost startling regularity, Walter is undeterred.

A vast majority of the reviews of Breaking Bad praise it, and rightfully so. Unfortunately the reviews themselves are bad, as many of their authors have the irritating tendency to allow their own fragile conception of morality taint their understanding of the show, such as this dink who says Walter is in denial about his “unspeakable crimes.” This could not be more wrong. If he were in denial he would be a very boring character. That Walter is very much aware of what he has been doing is precisely what makes him the most interesting person on television. He knows all too well what he has done and why he has done it. Yes, I’m sure for Walter his expensive cancer treatments help him to justify it all in his mind, but I get the sense that justification or no, he would be able live with himself just the same. In fact, he even tells Hank at one point that since he was diagnosed (and started cooking and knocking off dealers) he’s been sleeping better than he ever has.

Or how about this blathering buffoon, who is so taken aback by the actions of our protagonist that he describes Walter as “a guy we’re no longer sure whether to love or to be frightened of.” Rather than concern ourselves with whether we like Walter or are frightened by him, how about we just appreciate the character for what he is, instead of getting caught up the maelstrom of his misdeeds and criminal activity?

But what kind of reviews can you expect from a media that is aesthetically compromised by puerile concerns for morality? As H.L. Mencken once noted, Americans are entirely incapable of examining a book or a play, or in our case a television show, in terms of its artistic merit alone. This silly urge to pass moral judgment on characters in fiction precludes a mature understanding of the work at hand. Morality in Breaking Bad takes on only a secondary consideration, ready to be sacrificed and compromised when the forces of necessity and fate warrant. And that’s what makes the show so damn enthralling.

- Max

The End of the Universe

Once, in the throes of this heavy dextromethorphan trip I closed my eyes and saw the end of the universe. Not in a temporal sense—I wasn’t envisioning Armageddon or anything like that—but rather I saw that the universe was finite. My intoxicated and delirious brain had taken me over the vast reaches of space across billions of light-years through myriads of brilliantly glimmering galaxies until finally I came to an abrupt and startling halt. There, in the dark obscurity of distant space I encountered a menacing-looking wall so large I couldn’t tell where it began or where it ended. My brain could take me no further; it was the end of the journey. I had known no bounds, either physical or mental; my understanding was total. Suddenly, a sense of angst started to creep up on me little-by-little until it was so acute I was horrified to realize what I had just seen. The universe is limited, I thought. It is walled off! And then it hit me. We are all inmates in this colossal cosmic prison, condemned to act out the same routine day in and day out ad nauseum in the continuous loop that is our human tragedy. I had been sitting in my comfy office chair while exploring the universe, and when I realized what that giant barrier meant I recoiled violently, almost snapping the back of the chair clear off the seat.

With this epiphany came another: once we reach the end of the universe as I had, all hope is lost. That night I traveled farther than anyone ever had only to find that our universe is a prison and our freedom an illusion. We are no different from the convicts in San Quentin or Sing Sing who have been sentenced to a confined existence of daily redundancy. Our prison is bigger, but our fate is the same. Like the convict, we are restricted by limitations—the enemy of hope, which all humans possess and count on. We base our lives not just on how things are but how we would like them to be, and we often act in such a way so as to try to bring about some desired end. Hope is a fundamental component of the human condition. It is what keeps us going and gets us out of bed in the morning. Hope is the human being’s raison d’être. The realization of our hopes is contingent upon our overcoming the limitations standing in the way. With the end of limitations comes the end of hope.

So imagine my terror when, after having transcended all possible human limitations, I ran into that wall. I could go no further not because there was some other limitation I needed to surmount, but because there were no more limitations. Period. In my total understanding I knew that the wall could not be broken through or overcome in some way because I knew exactly "what" was on the other side. Nothingness. Oblivion. The Void. To think or speak of what was beyond that wall is entirely senseless. And I fully concede that I'm doing the concept no justice by attempting to name it because what I’m referring to is, after all, unnamable and unsayable. It simply cannot be said; for we do not possess the linguistic tools to describe it, nor do we even have the mental capacity to conceive of it. But in that moment sitting in my chair a universe away from planet Earth, I Understood, and never had I been so unnerved. Perhaps Wittgenstein was right when he said, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

Know your limits...even if you can reach the stars.

-Max

Who is a Rebel?

The rebel, Camus once wrote, is a person who says “no.” Indeed, the rebel’s “no” is a unique kind of rejection directed at forces much more powerful than himself. Governments, gods, and traditions are the most common targets of the no. In saying no to these forces the rebel stands in direct opposition not only to the specific thing he rejects, but also to all those who accept that which he refuses. What ensues is a contest between the rebel and the Heideggerian They.

Whether the opposition to the rebel from the They is strong or weak depends on how fervently the latter believes in what the rebel is rejecting. When the rebel says no, he says no to something important to the They: custom. Accepting a government as legitimate, believing a god exists, and thinking that a tradition is proper, are each examples of the They’s customs. The They is convinced of the rightness of its customs. Government, god, tradition, morals, etiquette, etc. are deeply embedded in society and as such shape the individuals who comprise it—the They. Hence, in rebelling against a custom of the They, the rebel rebels against the whole of society.

This is not the rebel’s aim, but the result is unavoidable. In rejecting some facet of society he finds unfavorable or detestable, he invites upon him the opposition of an indignant They in full force. By saying no to a dearly-held custom or conviction of the They, the rebel has distinguished himself as possessing peculiar morals. The They possesses a particular set of values, and as such, it thinks its values are optimal. As far as the They is concerned, when the rebel rejects some or all of the They’s values, the rebel in essence avers that he possesses suboptimal values. That the rebel is perceived as having inferior morals would be of no consequence were he alien to the society; for in that case he would simply be a novelty instead of a threat. But the rebel is always domestic, always local. He originates in the They and eventually breaks ranks. To be sure, the They is always shocked at the rebel because he was once of Them. His rebellion is evidence of a social breakdown and demonstrates that the They’s monopoly on thought and behavior is far from total, which frightens the They. For if the rebel—once a part of the They—can break loose, who cannot?

The They is inherently reactionary. It matters not what social or political customs and traditions it practices. When it comes to opposing the rebel, liberal societies are no more immune from reactionary tendencies than actual reactionary societies. The zealousness of the They’s opposition is the same in both. Only the methods for opposing the rebel are different. In opposing the rebel, The They “deals with” him. “Dealing with” is performed by the They on a daily basis—officially through the government and unofficially through public ridicule. Like the murderer, thief, and drunk driver, the They “deals with” the rebel.

Where the rebel has not crossed some legal boundary, the opposition of the They is constrained. Especially in liberal societies, the They is frustrated by the law-abiding rebel. Legally the rebel is allowed latitude when it comes to his rejectionist words and actions. He is free to say no and explain all the reasons why he says it, and he may even try to encourage those of the They to do the same. Liberal societies, therefore, furnish room for rebellion. As such, the They of the liberal society is frustrated. It wishes to silence the rebel and have that be the end of the matter, but the They cannot because that would be a violation of its own customs. At the same time, the They feels it cannot ignore the rebel because he threatens it. The They of the liberal society faces a conundrum: if the They silences the rebel in order to neutralize the threat, it will be rebelling against its own liberal customs, hence demonstrating that its values are not fixed, but mutable; thus the rebel would be vindicated in his attempt to topple merely mutable customs. On the other hand, if the They allows the rebel to proceed in his ways unfettered, he may become increasingly dangerous to the They and the status quo. What then, is the They of the liberal society to do?

-Max

Isolation Tanked: My time in a sensory deprivation chamber

The everyday routine of my banal existence was becoming increasingly unbearable by the minute. Work. School. Intolerable relatives. Nagging love interests. Mass culture. You get the idea. It was a tired and absurd act of redundancy which resembled the darker side of a dextromethorphan trip. Drastic action was needed. My sanity had to be saved and my mind cleansed of the rubbish which had been piling up in it.

Some time in an isolation tank seemed a plausible remedy for my ennui-induced melancholia. An isolation tank—or sensory deprivation chamber—is quite simply a large metallic box partially filled with water dense enough with Epsom salt so that the person in it can float on his back. The device is soundproof and inside it is blacker than Dick Cheney’s soul, and the only sense of touch is the feeling of water. The idea is to deprive the brain of external stimuli as much as possible.

Climbing into a tank was not my idea. Wolfgang had been ranting about its wonders for a good long while. Initially I thought the whole idea ridiculous, but on that dreary spring afternoon his incessant declamations about sensory deprivation and drug-less hallucination won me over. We drove to Auburn, Massachusetts over an hour away so we could fork over $50 apiece so we could each spend an hour in this devilish contraption. But, truth be told, I felt it was a small price to pay to satisfy a deviant curiosity. Most of all I wanted to see if I would hallucinate. I sure hoped so, as sometimes when the brain is deprived of stimuli, it can generate its own and make “realities” to fill the void; hence the “drug-less hallucinations.”

A brief aside: I would like to mention how Dr. John Lilly—who is elsewhere mentioned on this site—was a pioneer of the isolation tank. Lilly was fond of injecting himself with Ketamine and LSD before crawling into his chamber in what had to have been a pretty maddening ride. Now, surely most members of the general public would regard this endeavor as not only ridiculous, but indicative of an extremely disturbing and dangerous pathology. But rather than be cause for stigmatization, Lilly’s research and insights should garner him praise—at least among the enlightened. Indeed, social ostracism is often an indication of true genius.

When we arrived at the building where the tank was, I saw that the place was called the Crystalline Matrix. I carefully inspected the outside of the establishment, which looked like a dive. But when we went inside, we were greeted by fine interior decorating and colorful burning candles emitting peach-scented wisps of smoke. Suddenly, a vixen-looking woman emerged from an adjacent room. She had funky-looking eyes which seemed to be hiding some hideous secret. At that moment if she had told me she had just finished strangling three children with piano wire in the other room, I would have believed her wholeheartedly.

Wolf told the vixen that he had called earlier to let the place know we were coming. She said—in the creepiest manner possible—that she had been expecting us, and that she was positive we were going to enjoy our “time in isolation.” This is it, I thought. This is how it’s going to end. I'm in a real-life horror film and I’m going to be dead quite shortly. The vixen will never let us out of this place alive.

As I was coming to terms with my impending demise, another woman walked in. She was older and was definitely lacking adequate dental care. Her face was rough and tired; her whole being seemed frail. The vixen began talking to the hag and said, “You must be Destiny’s mother,” to which the older woman replied, “Yes.”

This exchange disturbed me more than the imminent death I thought was soon coming. While “destiny” could very well have been an actual person that the two women were referring to, I got the spine-chilling sense that they were not talking about a person, but rather, destiny, in the abstract. It was all so madcap and surreal. I thought, Am I tripping? Because this is definitely the kind of shit that happens when an alien substance is taking your brain out to the woodshed. Destiny’s mother? What the fuck? As if destiny itself weren’t already a scary enough prospect. I knew nothing of destiny then, nor do I now. But I tell you this. Although none of us may know what destiny is or what it holds for us, on that fateful spring day Wolf and I saw its mother; and destiny’s mother isn’t pretty. The fruit may not fall far from the tree.

After some uneasy small talk with the vixen proprietor, she briefed us on the basics of the tank. All this time, I was peeking over my shoulder to make sure no demons were sneaking up on me to rip my soul away. She then brought us to the tank room where I stripped down to a bathing suit I had on under my jeans, crawled in, and shut the door.

The Epsom-saturated water was piss warm. In a deprivation tank it has to be because if it’s too cold the tanker (one who is in an isolation tank; I just made that up) will be too focused on being cold. A successful tank experience begins with the understanding that you shouldn’t focus on anything while you’re in the tank. Thoughts should be kept to a minimum. Let the sights and the sounds and the smells come to you.

After what I estimated to be about thirty minutes in the tank, I began hearing what sounded like the tenor saxophone solo from Prokofiev’s score to Romeo and Juliet. It gradually became clearer and clearer, with the rest of the ensemble joining in to play the entire piece. I was angry because at that moment I assumed someone was playing music that I could somehow hear in the tank. The music was accompanied by rapid and intermittent flashes of yellow spots which I could “see” as I “looked” upward. While this was going on, I for some reason considered the possibility that I was no longer at the isolation chamber place, but somewhere else. But how could that be possible? If I’m in this tank, how could I not be at the place with the tank in good old Auburn? Where has this contraption taken me? Will I be able to return? How isolated is this isolation tank?

These were the thoughts racing through my mind when suddenly on my chamber door there came a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. “Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—only this and nothing more."

Only it wasn't a visitor, (nor a Raven) but the Vixen who then opened my chamber door. “Your time is up,” she said cryptically.

After I got out, dried off, and put my shirt and pants back on, I told Wolf that I was pissed that someone had decided to play music and provide me with an audible stimulus. He was perplexed. “What music?” he asked.
“That classical music they were playing. Prokofiev.”
“There was no music.”
“I heard it.”
“Dude, I was right here the whole time. I would’ve heard it. Besides, you were in a soundproof fucking tank.”
“Huh.”

Apparently my brain had made the whole piece up. Well, it hadn’t made it up, but it replayed it based on its previous hearings of it, which had been some time before—definitely over a year. The music had been a “real” hallucination, as of course had the flashing yellow spots.

So that’s what happened to me in the tank. I won’t say that it was wild or crazy or anything like that. Rather, the experience was pleasantly and calmly surrealistic. When I emerged from that tank I felt as refreshed as I had in months. I was rejuvenated and wanted a tank of my own. I still do.

-Max

Suicidal Dreaming

The other night I had the most vivid dream I’ve probably ever had—one that left an indelible impression on my mind, and one I feel compelled to convey in a post. In the dream I found myself peering down at the Merrimack River whooshing beneath this rickety bridge on whose edge I was standing. For those who aren’t familiar with it, the mighty Merrimack is a long snaking river that slinks its way down from central New Hampshire into northeastern Massachusetts where it makes a hard left and a mad dash for the Atlantic. During the heyday of America’s textile industry, the Merrimack powered the glum brick textile mills of Lowell, Lawrence and Haverhill, where mill girls toiled laboriously for half the day and maddeningly loud shuttle looms—with their noisy clunker clunk, clunker clunk, clunker clunk—bellowed in rooms that were hot and crowded. And strangely, I was thinking about all of this as I slept. In the dream, I was thinking about the mills, about the workers, about hydropower, in what was a sort of running historical narration going on in my suicidal mind in this most crazy of dreams. And now, this utilitarian river, with some help from gravity, would be put to practical use once again, this time to kill me.

I remember thinking how dark it was, even for nighttime. In that darkness I began to question my decision to go to that bridge to end it. That is, I questioned my choice of bridge, not the decision to end my life; to me, death was already a fait accompli; jumping was a mere formality. And while standing on that imagined bridge I thought, we are all dead already anyway. We are in fact the walking dead, wandering through a vast desert of civilization filled with mirages beckoning us with sexy but ultimately empty apparitions. The apparitions are real enough to us, but they are devoid of meaning.

I kept looking down at the river and realized it was the only thing in the universe that was real. I wasn't even real. But the river was real, and it was reality itself; it was fate itself; and it was waiting to swallow me whole and carry me out to the ocean where I'd float forever.

I could faintly see the outline of jagged rocks protruding from the surface of a frenzied current. Not far enough of a drop, I thought. Then I began thinking about the few people I knew of who had gone over in fatal freefall in the past couple of years. Was it three dead? I wondered. Yeah, three. But was it three who went over, or four? Is the success rate 100% or 75%? It mattered.

As I was trying to figure out the collective batting average of the bridge’s leapers, I suddenly arrested my thoughts. This was exactly the sort of behavior that got me in trouble in the first place. Too much Goddamn thinking. Catching myself in the act was all the cue I needed. As I fell faster and faster towards the water and serrated rocks below, I thought about what my death certificate ought to say for a cause of death instead of just “massive head trauma” or “drowning” or some such nonsense. I struggled for a moment before thinking the words, ‘acute pensiveness.’ It was all I could come up with under the circumstances. Inelegant, but accurate. Truth matters. I was going to die just how I had lived: over-thinking, and about things you wouldn’t expect given that I was either about to die, or survive with injuries that would make me regret that I hadn’t.

I hit the water. It was even darker now than before.

~Max