Talking to whales

Well, I’ve done interviews on some pretty neat ol’ cliches such as sex and rock ‘n’ roll, and other cool stuff like food and poop. There’s one issue I’ve kind of skirted around and that’s DRUGS. People really dig their drugs. Read all about it.

 

Anonymous 1

Have you ever done acid?
Once.

What was it like?
Pretty cool. I talked to whales.

How many hits did you take?
Just one.

What did the whales say to you?
I couldn’t understand them – I was just makin’ it up. I thought they could understand me, ya know? Like I was like speaking to them, but not them to me.

So, when they spoke was it like “Woo-woo woo-woo woo woo woo”?
That’s what I was saying back. I was standing on a rock screaming at the ocean talking to all the whales.

For some reason I was under the impression that you weren’t on a beach. Were you on a beach?
No, I was on the beach, it was real.

You should’ve told me that you were on a beach, that would have been a much more interesting story.
Sorry.

What’s the heaviest – uh, acid? Was that the heaviest drug?
Probably. Well there was speed in the acid but other than that, I don’t know, ecstasy maybe?

You didn’t end up making out with your best friend did you?
No, my girlfriend took me to a rave in San Francisco and I’d never been to a rave. I’m not really a raver kind of guy. But once I was on ecstasy I had fuckin’ great time, man.

People were like, blowin’ in my eyeballs and like running their fingers up and down my back, and one person actually licked my face. Best thing ever!

Why don’t more people do ecstasy?
They’re squares, man. Plus it melts your brain, puts your brain in your spinal column and your brain just goes away. Kills you, kills your brain.

But you’re talking to me. It doesn’t sound like your brain is gone. You don’t sound like your brain is in your – lemme look, let me get a good look at you – it doesn’t look like your brain is in your spine.
Just a little bit of it is, not enough. But I don’t know, you wouldn’t want to do it all the time, because it wouldn’t feel as good. But you would want to do mushrooms all the time.

 

Anonymous 2

Do you like drugs?
Yes.

What kinds of drugs?
Oh, uh, narcotics.

Well aren’t narcotics drugs?
As far as I can tell, love is drugs, narcotics is drugs, sex is drugs.

What’s the best drug you’ve ever had?
Um, mescaline.

Mescaline? That sounds terrific. How did you come by this mescaline?
Hippies used to, uh – uh, cut it off of plants in the New Mexican desert.

Were you in New Mexico?
No, I was in Portland, Ore.

Did you feel like a Lizard King?
No, I felt like a Peyote king.

What would a Peyote king do?
Would ah – a Peyote king would ah – uh – uh – contemplate the beauty of the universe and uh – and its very own intricate connection to it.

So it was fun?
It was fun indeed.

Other than all that philosophical stuff, did you get any good visuals?
Yes, everything was exceptionally clear and bright. Colorful, if I may say.

Did you see any elves or anything?
I didn’t see anything I don’t see right now.

Are you on drugs now, my friend?
No, just a little coffee, nicotine and a little THC.

Well, THC would be considered “on something.” Has there ever been a time when you were on drugs and you had kind of a bad experience?
Oh, I’ve had bad experiences every day of my life, on drugs, without drugs, with drugs. It’s part of life to have bad experiences.

Y’ever have an experience where the drugs were the problem?
Of course. Drugs are not toys, and a person can hurt themselves with them just as easily as with a car or a sword or a hammer.

Did you have to learn that the hard way?
I woke up to a siren outside, which keyed in with some suggestion that the fire in the fireplace could catch the wall behind it on fire, and I woke up hallucinating that the house was on fire.

Oh my. But it really wasn’t on fire?
It could also be described in an archetypal way as going through a passage of fire like in the Tibetan Bardos.

Could you spell ‘bardos’ for me?
B-A-R-D-O-S, as in Tibetan, as in the plains of astral life.

Wow, that’s pretty heavy, man.
Life is heavy.

 

Anonymous 3

Can you tell me about drugs?
Well, I’ve got a lot to say on the subject. I’ve done every drug under the sun. I’ve been heavily addicted to several of them. My position right now on drugs is anti-drug.

Why would that be?
Because of the suffering I’ve endured. Particularly from methamphetamine and heroin abuse, for the amount of money I’ve spent.

How much money have you spent?
I’d estimate that I’ve spent $5,000 [in the past five months] or more on drugs, but you lose count because you lose memory. Money becomes nothing; it’s just a ticket to get high. You know, you could easily spend hundreds a month on drugs and not be able to make your rent and not even care. You sell off your personal belongings, you pawn things. I pawned my guitar. You lose everything. You start living for one thing and that’s drugs. You live in a bubble where nothing can get to you and that makes you weak, drugs make you weak. They make you unable to enjoy things without them. You feel shitty all the time and you forget how you felt when you were normal. You’re not really getting high at all. You constantly crave it and nothing seems as good anymore. A walk in the park just isn’t a walk in the park, a sunny day just isn’t a sunny day, because you don’t have drugs. You remember something better. It’s like having really great sex just once, nothing else can measure up to that. Plus they’re so available and so cheap, unlike sex. You don’t have to pass any kind of test. All you need is money and you can get it.

So, if you get too high, would you say you get low?
Well, it’s not so much that you’re high, it’s that you’re side-ways. You’re side-stepping your life. It’s kind of like hiding out in a tent to escape a forced march. You never get to the destination because you never get to the march. So you just hide in the tent and everybody passes you by. You get ugly, you smell bad, you don’t care about your personal appearance anymore, you get ashamed, you get angry, and you slowly destroy your brain and your ability to connect. Everything seems inaccessible. You become a coward, afraid.

How do you get to that state? How do you start in the first place? What’s the appeal to begin with?
When you first do drugs your brain is fresh, so you do get high, you do have good times. But those good times last about two to three months in my experience with any drug, and then the bad times start. I’m talking about meth and heroine.
LSD, you start to have bad trips after the first dozen, maybe.

What was the worst trip you had on LSD?
Well, probably when I turned into a tiger at the Einst퀨͌_rzende Neubauten concert and ended up getting arrested for breaking into my brother’s laundry room where I fell asleep. I completely blacked out that whole night, but I think I was running around like a tiger through downtown most of the night. All I know is that when I woke up in the laundry room I was soaking wet and there was a policeman with an attack dog and his gun drawn cornering me.

So it wasn’t fun.
It wasn’t fun. The worst aspects of drug abuse are paranoia, depression, anxiety and insomnia. People who use too many drugs screw up their brain chemistry so that you can never really be normal afterwards. Meth was the worst. It pretty much destroyed my life for about two years, and I was a wreck, so depressed that every day I thought of killing myself. You lose your attachment to your life because of the way that death means nothing. You crave death. You see someone getting killed in a movie and you envy them instead of feeling sorry for them. You can’t enjoy anything and you can’t sleep either. That’s the worst, the long torturous nights unable to do anything. You can’t read a book because everything that you once might have been able to deal with becomes very depressing. Books become part of the serious world that you feel excluded from. You can only enjoy the shallowest things, because everything else reminds you of what you can’t deal with.

I’ll say one more thing: drugs play into our postmodern notions of individuality and narcissism perfectly. Addiction is the ultimate post-modern condition.