To understand the times you live in you need to jump in. How could you possibly begin to understand vast swathes of culture without having taken recreational drugs? Growing through my teens I experimented to the max with hallucinogens. I did some 100 acid trips, some 500 mushroom trips. Not just seventies wall paper and psychedelic music made sense but a huge history of fairy tales; the English history of Witchcraft, art stretching back through history. We thought we had found an evolutionary trigger to catapult us in to a new state of being. Music, literature, film , theatre, architecture even, virtually every aspect of culture has been informed and sculpted by the drugs of the day. Beginning in the late '80s with Acid House the shift in music, graphics, film all bore the mark of MDMA. It was a rebirth for my generation who were already seasoned acidheads, we were ready for ecstasy. There is no point in going to the disco if you stand at the side watching others dance, you need to jump in if you want to take part, to understand fully not through the detached eyes of an anthropologist.
But the horrific damage has been the characteristic of my later life. Virtually all the participants are scarred.
Heroin took the lives of many friends. Others have disfunctional relationships with alcohol. Here is not the place to list my personal damage other than to say I'm hard to trump in an NA meeting.
These days I don't drink or drug. No amount of cultural understanding, no depth of consciousness expansion can compensate for the death, insanity and addiction that has followed. With fried brains my generation sought solace in darker drugs and drink.
In complete mental breakdown, having tried every avenue of chemical thought and feeling enhancement, I finally learned that all drugs can damage you. You can use any drug to play games of self deception. Addiction is not about the macho recovery meeting bravado of how much you took, no, it is the degree of denial you were in, the amount of self deception, how lost you were, how much of a fool and characature of yourself you had become. There was a time when I thought addiction meant physical dependence. That if you injected anyone with heroin three times a day for three months then that was an addict. Now I know people can be addicts on very little.
Maybe if you have a temperate moderate character, maybe then you could find a way. If you fully commit to things, if you give it your all in life then drugs will trip you up. For me life is now oppositional to what it once was. I don't want to bend and twist my consciousness to see how strange being can be. I want to see how straight thinking I can get. How clear can I make things.
Recently I have been writing about Martin who I knew from age eight or so until he died in Richards kitchen a decade ago. Richard has since died too. Turps OD'd on heroin, Widd cut his wrists and bled in to a bathroom cabinet. I moved away but kept being called home for another funeral. In this town, where I hoped to escape from all this further friends died. At first I linked it to the earlier deaths of close friends Woody, John and Animal who all died coming off bikes. Death is death, after all, how it finds you may not matter.
This last year has changed my views. There is a sense that denial of drugs would be a denial of all we believed in. An admission that the way we chose, as a rejection of our backgrounds was wrong. I now conclude we made a dreadful mistake. I took it as an expected hazard that playing such an extreme game would inevitably incur casualties. Rock climbers have a similar attitude. Recently though it has not been in anyway a sieve for those too weak or crazy to fall through but a decxonstructon of the greatest minds of my generation.
As my mind was in tatters. Awash with hallucinations. Chemistry all to cock. Personality itself crumbling. Reality falling apart. I saw that it was deeper than I could have imagined. I had suffered depression, even schizoid episodes, yet through all that there had been a sense of 'me' inside it all. No one knows how it is inside anothers head but I had assumed it would be like it is inside mine. I knew you could become so down you did not want to live but somehow I never realised you could quash the self. That I, or anyone like me could be reduced to a broken animal. A set of reactions with no pilot in charge. The end of self.
Around the time I became aware of how much the mind could crumble a close family member was sectioned. She suffers from schizophrenia periodically that is kept to a degree in check with drugs. Anyone with experience with anti psychotic drugs will know that the pay off is a slim one. If you are kept subdued by these chemical restraints life is a sluggish traipse through a muddy, dull world. You put on weight, nothing is interesting, your self esteem drops. Stop taking them, and your mind regains its' elasticity. Your sharp personality returns. You make brilliant connections, enthusiasm grows. Until you find yourself making the wrong brilliant connections.
Illness of the self is worse than illness of the body.
A friend who I have known for 30 or more years had become ill too. I talked to him one night as he stood by a tree in some woods in the rain with a noose. He got passed this and moved in with another friend. We talked and something has broken in his head. He has always lived the party life. He was my first dealer introducing me to the doors of perception, as Aldous Huxley called them. His life had been one long party, an experiment in hedonism and friendship. Opiates had never been his tipple of choice but alcohol had become a daily feature. After stripping his brain of serotonin and other chemicals he ust have been raw and a modest alcohol habit was enough to strip him of self.
From his bedroom, the lad who had put him up heard a crash, his dog warned him something was a miss. Outside he found our friend in tears with a broken leather belt round his neck and a pile of blister strips of swallowed drugs.
Since then I have talked to him and am ashamed to say I find it unpleasent. He cannot seem to see any way out other than death. All thoughts of others have disappeared leaving him with a total desent in to his own mind. He was never like this before. How could someone so bright, so optimistic, someone so undependent on material goods become so crushed.
There is a part of me that hopes his condition is the result of alcoholism and that once his brain has dried out its' chemistry will return to normal. There is nothing you can say to give him perspective. He self harms and, if not for his being sectioned under the mental health act would undoubtedly be dead.
He was a hero of mine; he still is a great friend, seeing him broken is somehow worse than all the deaths. The loss of self is the worst fate that can befall anyone. If you are still aware you can face death. Stripped of personality there is no self from which to refer.
The ambulance took him away three weeks ago
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