Okay so I took acid and I watched the world and it was kind of nice after a day of being tired and miserable for no readily apparent reason.

Now I was UP! Everyone crashed, went home, worked their mojo and there I was with nothing but upness filling my soul.

Here’s another curious notion. I wasn’t much amazed by acid because I had managed to have a similar experience before by simply thinking. And it was in Tucson too. Around the winter of 2000, I was here, I was thinking all the fucking time about life, meaning, consciousness, evolution, and all that silly bullshit that people usually only ponder on acid except I was steeped in that shit for months, driving around the country thinking about meaning all the live long day.

At some point my mind snapped and for a month it seemed like everything was more-than-beautiful. It was the only the way to describe it and it was described at length in the compressed rewritten version of the website I did while driving around the US, Driveabout.

So acid didn’t blow my mind or change my life. It didn’t make me think I could fly or that lizards have taken over my bathroom. It did snap me into that place where everything was amazing and that’s kind of nice.

Laying in my monk’s cell of an apartment, acid in my head, not having even napped in over a day, my mind was on fire with connections. All kinds of connections.

Another Bill Hicks quote: Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we’re the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather.

It was kind of like that but with a little more science thrown into the mix, a little more complex adaptive systems and evolution thrown into the mix, but just about like that. And all the profound thoughts and powerful feelings end with the triviality of life. You end up back where you began.

This is what no one much talks about and all the mystics allude to in their writings. At the end of the day, when your brain is filled with love and wonder at everything everywhere you still have to go back to life and do all the things that you have to do to be alive. You still have to take a shit even though you love the universe.

And while I’m connecting to my personal hero Bill Hicks I’m tossing out this quote too (all gotten from Wikiquote:

Folks: It’s time to evolve ideas. You know, evolution didn’t end with us growing thumbs. You do know that, right? Didn’t end there. We’re at the point, now, where we’re going to have to evolve ideas. The reason the world is so fucked up is we’re undergoing evolution. And the reason our institutions, our traditional religions, are all crumbling, is because … They’re no longer relevant. [laughs] They’re no longer relevant. So it’s time for us to create a new philosophy and perhaps even a new religion, you see. And that’s OK ’cause that’s our right, ’cause we are free children of God with minds who can imagine anything, and that’s kind of our role.

It is time for a new religion. One with a DJ in place of the organ and maybe some breakdancers in place of the choir or just enhancing the choir. And songs that uplift! Not that funeral dirge bullshit. The Sufis knew about music. Follow their path and install a laser light show too!

[small aside: I don't know if Bill Hicks read about memes before he died but if he hadn't he was channeling the thoughts of the future.]

That Sunday afternoon it was time for more movie making. Yea for more movie making!

Although just about the time I was expected to function in an intellectual and creative capacity the now nearly 48 hours of non-sleep started to catch up with me.

Did you ever try to set up lights while you’re so tired that the concept of on and off is vaguely baffling? I did and my work was less than stellar. Important lesson reiterated that day: never turn the omni light on while you’re looking at it. Also, don’t grab the light with the blown lens that had been on for two hours with your bare hand.

I’m still afraid to look at the footage because I suspect it will look like it was shot by a very tired brain damaged child…which it kind of was and that wasn’t quite the look I think I had in mind. It was supposed to be a parody of the confessional shots in reality TV shows. Not a parody of an incompetent film making experience and I think that’s what I ended up with.

Whatever happened though, it was fun and the very fact of forcing myself to try to be creative woke me up. By midnight I was drinking a martini that had bleu cheese stuffed olives and talking about foreign policy and global economic trends.

This was how college was supposed to be. Not the engineering hell I lived.

At one point I wrote on this silly introspective bullshit website that I was aging backwards. As a child I was old and responsible, weak and sickly. Then I turned into an ascetic monk pushing myself to all sorts of physical limits. Then I started to rejoin the world but I never learned how to live in the world and I still don’t quite understand any of the tumultuous events going on around me or the emotions rolling around in my own head. Then I had my had my heart broken, experienced loss for the first time and that freed me in countless ways. But I’m still a child in this respect. Acting out and reacting in ways I don’t even want to do when painful memories pop up.

I’m old physically. I’m starting to live my life like I should have in college instead of hiding from the world like I did. It’s just so fucking weird to see this and know this and realize this is your silly life.

I guess I’m having more fun than I used to and even if almost every human interaction I have is fraught with angst and usually ends badly at least I’m having them. That’s better than being an ascetic living in the wilderness.

(You see? I don’t even need acid to be introspective. I can do that just by drinking coffee!)

Sleep, when it finally showed up on my doorstep, sodden footed, beaten, bloody, wearing a turban, was a welcomed site.