Confessions of a middle-aged ecstasy eater

[Heretic.Ape.]

[top]Confessions of a Middle-Aged Ecstasy Eater

Anonymous

To the reader. I hereby present you with a record, of sorts, of a remarkable period in my life. According to my application of it, I trust, as I likewise hope, that it may prove not merely interesting, but, to a considerable degree, useful and instructive. It is in that hope that I have troubled myself to draw it up, even as I feel compelled in advance to apologize for breaching that delicate and honourable reserve which, until quite recently—when certain publishers became aware that there was for the marketing of such breaching an apparently limitless audience, that is, one ripe to be r(e)aped—has restrained me from the public exposure of my own errors and infirmities.

Which makes me no less reluctant to do so, for while there are many whom it would please loudly to dispute it—they do not know me well enough, or know all too well but that certain part of me—I am, at heart, an abashed man. Indeed so alive am I to the professional reproach and public humiliation that such exposure necessarily would arouse that I have for months resisted the prodding of certain parties to permit any part of my narrative to come before the public. And it is not without enormous anxiety, nor an absence of insomniac nights, that I have, at last, reached the decision to do so however constrained I am to remain anonymous in the doing.

This is not, understand, owing to my self-accusation constituting a confession of guilt, any more than it does an expression of hubris. I feel no guilt, none at all. I know this to be true for I am as susceptible to guilt (and shame and self-loathing) as to self-aggrandizement, and in this instance I feel of either, as I do of both, neither tweak nor discernible twinge. As pertains to what follows, such feelings are utterly beside the point.

That said, I am not, thank God, Thomas de Quincey (or Coleridge, Baudelaire, Cocteau, Huxley, Paul Bowles, Carlos Castenada, William Burroughs, Ken Kesey or Hunter S. Thompson, to name but the more usual of the usual suspects), and the irreparable harm that revealing my identity inevitably would inflict, not only upon my professional reputation but upon those whom I love and care deeply for, simply is not commensurate with the benefits liable to redound to me in so doing. Perhaps some day, one day when we all of us are more—what?—grown up? Grown up enough, at least, to be less hysterical and apocalyptic about the subject at hand. But for now, more's the pity, no. If I do not court censure, neither do I curry accolade, and so for the time being am, as I must be, content to skulk behind the craven's mask.

I am fast—I am tempted to say far too fast, save that it never ceases to strike me as the unlikeliest of miracles—approaching my fiftieth year, and most of my adult life has been lived comfortably upon the right side of the law, first as a journalist, then as a novelist, prose-poet and essayist. I am at present, or so I gather, what I so long ago explicitly aspired to become—a man of letters.

From my birth I was as it seems to me now an intellectual creature first—I emerged from the womb (if one is to believe my mother, and how dare I do otherwise) brow furrowed, face knit in an expression of the most singular concentration and perplexity: ‘Where the hell am I and why am I here, what precisely is going on and what, pray tell, if there be one, which seems increasingly unlikely, is the point?' and I do not wonder, for those questions I grapple with still, as still without adequate answers. And so intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have always been, even from my schoolboy days.

I know little for an immanent certainty, but this I immanently, most certainly do (one needn't be Stephen Hawking to appreciate such evident truth)—nothing surpasses the life of the mind, that same mind, as William Gass has rightly observed, that is the ‘only claw man has'. And so, if eating Ecstasy be chiefly a sensual, and so a mindless pleasure, and if, as I confess, I have indulged in it to excess, no less true is that I have struggled to understand my habit, if not yet with the religious zeal required properly to get shed of it.

But then, perhaps I do not wish to get shed of it, not really, or not nearly enough. And this is but one of the many lessons, insofar as one may be disposed to receive them, that Ecstasy is wont to impart: that first principles—of life, love, God, beauty—fly apart, and it is not incumbent upon us to puzzle them through that we might piece them together again, but merely do as we might to hold on for dear life, to ride out the storm and, as we may manage it, gather unto ourselves some little enjoyment in the doing. Anything else not only is an utter waste of time, but an exercise in self-deception, deceit and the grossest, most overweening vanity. Ecstasy—and not merely the drug—never was intended to be intellectualized.

Order, even creatively ordered order, perhaps especially creatively ordered order—that which it pleases intellectuals such as myself to anoint Art (and oh, how we do insist in the solemnity of our self-congratulation upon the capitalization of that A)—is powerless against the chaos, because that chaos resides not only out there, in the ‘real' world, but inside each one of us. It is hewn to the double helix, the anarchic state of our collective soul, and its only counter, its only effective antidote, is death. Against which, I fear, no vaccine—at least, not yet. (Though if science can design for us Ecstasy, can immortality be far behind?)

I have occasionally been asked how I first came to it, that is, how I became a regular Ecstasy-eater, the assumption being, I presume, that I was seeking a cheap (I have paid as little as ten dollars a pill when buying ‘in bulk', seldom more than twenty-five dollars) and ephemeral thrill, pursuing a temporary state of pleasurable, if wholly artificial excitement, the craic of that High, the visceral flow of its fix, the ultimate roll. And perhaps, at first, I was. I was aware of its reputation as the ‘Love Drug', had heard it described—I can no longer recall just where—as a ‘four-hour, full-body orgasm', had read Sean Elder's seminal 1986 article, ‘On Ecstasy', and all of this I found—what?—intriguing, appealing, alluring? Well, I found it worthy of further investigation.

Which is odd, because ordinarily I would not have condescended to pay it the slightest heed. Even at university, the high times of those heady years—in my case 1969 to 1976—I was not a user, chronic, casual or otherwise. Despite an environment in which experimentation with illegal substances was culturally certified as little more than an alternative form of recreation, indeed in which smoking grass and dropping acid (if not yet snorting coke or shooting smack), was not only benignly accepted, but benevolently smiled upon, I deliberately chose not to indulge. (OK, once. I did some speed. I had fallen behind in a course and was facing an all-nighter. I swallowed the pill, whole—something called a ‘white cross' as I for no earthly reason recall—and was up, each of my senses on red alert, my heart a snare drum in my ears, my eyes seeming literally to sweat, the world standing newel-post straight at full attention for the ensuing forty-eight hours. I saw tigers everywhere and heard the incessant wailing of sirens. I learned later I ought to have ingested only half. I never did it again.) And this, one ought not with a measure of humility hesitate to aver, required no fair amount of self-discipline, as it did a right gathering of will. The dope was everywhere, it seemed at times to be in the very drinking water, in the air itself, and everyone—including my friends (my closest was a jazz musician, imagine), more than a few girlfriends, and most of my professors, as they were content enough to broadcast—was doing it.

Reputation Comments on this post:

loved every second of this, thanks :)

[Heretic.Ape.]

Except me. I wasn't. And this had nothing to do with feelings of superiority or intolerance (however consistently I may have refused to suffer hedonists gladly), or the bucking of countercultural convention, as it did less with morality or politics or religion. (I was in those days, right down to the black of my beret, an existentialist on the first count, a raving anarchist of the Malatesta school on the second, a crypto-Kierkegaardian on the third—or so I recollect fancying myself.) It had to do solely with fear. Not only was I afraid of ‘fucking with my mind', I was petrified of irreparably fucking it up. I took myself seriously, far too seriously—those were serious times for those of us who took them seriously, as seriously as did I—and I steadfastly refused to buy into the druggie/head trip/stoner agitprop of the day. Reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, listening to Hendrix or the Doors, Cream or the Airplane was more than enough for me. I was possessed of no itch to experience the psychedelics of that ‘trip' first-hand, as I felt no exigency about making God's more intimate acquaintance.
Not that I was, despite my Midwestern Calvinist upbringing, narrow-minded or uncurious, nor was I unhip. If I was far from some paragon of Mailer's White Negro, well, even the Negroes I knew—I hung out a lot in jazz clubs—were not paragons of Mailer's White Negro. (Indeed, over time, I have come to surmise that only Mailer himself—and perhaps Mick Jagger—ever was.) Simply, I was scared. Small wonder, then, how often those select few with knowledge of my current habit have remarked—less appalled, perhaps, than incredulous—upon my being the ‘least likely person in the world' to have fallen prey to it.

Well, yes. And likewise, no. For while I cannot swear with spot-on certainty, I believe that my coming to Ecstasy—or it to me—goes further than mere thrill-seeking. I believe it goes to the centre of my life at the time, a life that, to employ a colloquially turned phrase, was a mess. I was headed south, a south sunless, unlovely and cold.
This is difficult, even now, to talk about. We all have our war stories. Mine is but one more heaped among the remains of the rest. I do not presume to claim for it some vaunted or exalted status. I have no desire to extol what merits no extolling (much less to aestheticize it). If ecstasy is not meant to be intellectualized, neither is suffering intended to be phenomenalized, particularly where it is of no higher order than anyone else's. If it is special, somehow different, that is only because it is mine and mine alone. It was a period of personal devastation. Such periods eventually are visited upon us all. We all encounter those dark fires through which we must walk or perforce self-immolate, and no one who lives his life as it is meant to be lived ought to expect to emerge from them unscathed. One's scars are not chevrons; they are not meant to be brandished like stigmata.

It began with my only child, a son—he was then my best friend, from time to time still is—and I did not see it coming (not that I was looking; I was sitting on a fast ball, not the curve I was eventually served), and it culminated in Ecstasy, and to that I see no end. He was beautiful and sensitive—perhaps too sensitive, more than I knew or he had a right to be, this permeable membrane—and extraordinarily talented, talented enough that at thirteen his poetry had won the notice of university professors and New York book editors alike; the budding Rimbaud. So when he undertook to destroy himself, he took his mother and father with him. That was not, nor is it, his fault. He was thirteen and had neither the capacity nor context to grasp what he was doing. He was then being held hostage to problems of his own, problems he could no more articulate than dogs do long division, trees turn somersaults or thunder parse sentences, and which he would have roundly denied if he could. And if he had been capable of knowing the pain and heartache his behaviour was causing the two people he loved most in the world, he would not have cared. He was not, then, possessed of the wherewithal.

One always can be more specific, describe more, one always can concretize experience. The only issue is how detailed, how concrete, how descriptively specific one wishes to be. So: he attempted suicide. (The details are unimportant; the very devil is in them.) He ran away, serially. He purchased a handgun from a school friend. He stole, sometimes from stores, more often from his parents, typically in the middle of the night. He was arrested for stealing. He was sentenced to community service. He committed various, not particularly imaginative acts of vandalism. He taunted and cussed at strangers on the street. He got drunk—beer, wine, liquor, whatever he could lay his hands on—and when he got drunk, he got violent. He verbally and physically abused his mother. He attempted, using a pair of candles, to set her hair on fire. The second time he used gasoline. He dismantled furniture, broke china, smashed crystal and, unprovoked, punched out windows and kicked in walls. He shredded his wardrobe with scissors, every stitch of his clothing, and when he had finished, started in on his mother's. He trashed his bedroom down to lathings, shims and cinder block. He graffitied what remained with every racial and sexual epithet imaginable. He slept on the floor amid rotting food, curdled milk, the mouse droppings that appeared in their wake and a rubble of plaster, drywall and broken glass. He refused to bathe. He defecated in the yard and urinated in Coke cans which he deployed about his bedroom in pentagrams, these red metal voodoo dolls. He carved his arms with the filed-down ends of paper clips. He discovered marijuana, then cocaine. Then PCP. Then Special K (an animal tranquillizer, which he called ‘catfood'). He fought with friends. One scrape involved a spot of knife play culminating in a facial slash requiring a ten-stitch repair. The few that remained he manipulated and abused, this adolescent Svengali. He was flung through a plate-glass window by a schoolmate, a football player, escaping serious injury, according to the principal, ‘only by divine intervention'. He was expelled from high school. He impregnated a girl. There was an abortion. He disappeared for days at a time, often into New York City where he slept in storefronts and abandoned buildings and on park benches; at least twice he was shaken down at knifepoint. He sold or bartered his personal belongings, many of them Christmas and birthday presents—guitars, stereo equipment, CD collections, wristwatches, leather jackets—to raise money to buy drugs. He contracted one sexually transmitted disease, then another. He was under age, so when he drove his friends' cars he did so illegally. High on cocaine, he eventually rolled one on the Interstate while going in excess of eighty mph. That he and his two passengers, one his girlfriend, were not killed outright—the car came to rest on its roof in a creek bed; they climbed out bruised and bloodied through its open trunk—was in the by-now familiar words of the State Trooper, ‘only a matter of divine intervention'. He escaped incarceration at the state juvenile detention facility only because the court was inexplicably merciful. He dropped out of a second, ‘alternative' school. He worked sporadically, a succession of menial, part-time jobs, none of which lasted more than a few weeks: window washer, hod carrier, gas jockey, bellhop. Eventually he was removed from his home and consigned—exiled, really—first to lockdown in a private psychiatric ward, then to a special school out of state. He was counselled. He was diagnosed with a variety of acronyms: AD, ADD, ODD, ICD, possible BP. He was prescribed medication: Zoloft, Depakote, Paxil, Wellbutrin. When that school and that counsel and that medication did not ‘take', he was given different medication and more counselling and sent to yet another school out of state, a private high school with an annual tuition fee of $40,000. While there, during an off-campus weekend, he was arrested and jailed overnight for possession and sentenced to community service. He briefly participated in a scam to pass counterfeit money. He took his exam and got his driver's licence. Two months later he had accumulated thirteen points. His licence was suspended. He kept driving anyway. He was now dealing as well as using drugs and the wheels were essential to what he called his ‘livelihood', as they were conducive to his lifestyle, a lifestyle redolent of a vampire's, for he lived upside down, sleeping all day, drugging all night. Eventually, in the course of one five-day spree, he totalled two automobiles, one his father's, pulverizing his ankle so badly in the process that it required twenty-six staples, ten screws and two stainless-steel plates to reconstruct. I would not swear to the precise chronology of any of this—even now it remains a blur—but to this I would: he strewed wreckage everywhere. His was another kind of reality, an unreality perhaps, an anti-reality, and those drawn into the chaos of its orbit, those who found themselves cobbed in its web inevitably suffered damage.

In the meantime his parents' marriage, all twenty years of it, was collapsing. My wife was and remains a beautiful, caring, generous, gifted woman. She is the oldest soul I know, the blithest spirit, and I would not hesitate to give my life for her, and though we no longer live together, have not lived together for years, I admire and, on some level, love her still, as I know I always shall. But sometimes that is not enough. Sometimes nothing is enough, as sometimes everything isn't. The marriage had its long-standing problems, its rifts and fractures and shoals, and when it came under siege and then assault, when our son began the process of so thoroughly, as we took to referring to it, ‘flushing himself', the stress was too much. We lost our way, then ran aground, and then, at last, we broke.
We tried over and over again to address the issues, patch the problems, spackle them, caulk them, span them, fill them, whatever it is one does when one senses imminent demolition and doesn't know quite why and is floundering as one flails and hasn't a clue what to do. We tried because we once had had something valuable, because we shared an intimate history of mutual investment, because we once had cherished the sound of one another's laughter, because not trying seemed to us grotesque. We tried because we loved one another and because we loved our son, in the face of whose own self-demolition neither of us could have survived intact. If that sounds melodramatic, it should. It was a melodramatic time.

So we broke, and I left. Oh, not straight away—the break was anything but clean; it was tortured, as it became Byzantine—and I never went far. A basement apartment across the street, a rodent-infested one the next town over. I was in and out, out and in, back in and back out for years. I was at a loss as to how I could properly leave and unsure I wished to find out. But then, I wasn't sure of much, not any more, and that disconcerted almost as much as it depressed me, because being dead certain, even when I was dead wrong, was a quality I had typically hung my hat on. The quintessential male facade, and one behind which I was quaking.
I couldn't seem to stop quaking.

[Heretic.Ape.]

Eventually I found a place just bleak enough to mirror the way I felt, and I felt dreadful, wretched, unsalvageable, I felt vile and violated, and I felt lost. And solitary. And wrong. All of me, wrong. I stopped shaving, bathing, sleeping. In time I stopped eating. (Over one three-month period I shed forty pounds.) I no longer recognized the aesthetics of myself. There are any number of poetic words that lend themselves to the state to which I had descended, but a single, six-letter one seems best: bereft—‘void of; taken away, removed, quite gone'. Somehow I had become radioactive, the world a wilderness of asperity, and I was left to maunder it untethered and mapless, self-menaced and heartsore and seared.

The place was a single, windowless room scarce larger than a tool shed, a root cellar space attached to the back of an abandoned garage, and I wallowed in it, in its cobwebs and scum-scrim and filth—I hadn't, naturally, the wherewithal to clean up after myself—alone. And so it was alone that I began to disintegrate. I continued to write, frantically, incessantly, desperately, because writing was the only way I knew to stay afloat, though looking back I cannot say whether I was writing myself out of what I sensed was an approaching madness, or writing myself more deeply into it.

The nightmares arrived on cue. Not images of hell and its hounds—those I might have withstood—but waterfalls and rivers of words. No images, no meanings, just words, disconnected, decontextualized, foaming, alone. Words as onrushing water, whirlpools and eddies and swirls. I was afflicted by freshets and torrents, marooned in the froth of their flow. Cascades, cataracts, outpours, an unending, recurring cadence that streamed forth in syntactical arabesques. I was haemorrhaging rhymes and the metre of verbs, and each morning, 4 a.m., 5 a.m., morning after morning for months, I awoke unbuoyed and drenched to the bone.

And I wondered, as I wonder still, which of us is possessed of the temerity to suggest that we are not drowning? To gainsay that we are not being dragged under, again and again, and forever?

Somehow, I no longer recall just how and prefer even now not to, I completed the 500-page draft of a novel about, of all things, Lizzie Borden, but when I submitted it to my agent he deemed it ‘one of the most brilliant pieces of insanity' he had ever read, declared it utterly unmarketable, and declined to take it on. (He was, I see now, as I was incapable of seeing then, perfectly correct to do so. Brilliant it may have been, insane it decidedly remains.) We parted company, upon the heels of which my editor quit his job at a prominent New York publishing house. My marriage was dead—though I still insisted upon thinking of it as merely semi-comatose—my son still very much alive, I was agentless, editorless, apparently unpublishable, was living like a tramp and a recluse, my income close to nil, and slowly, and then not so slowly, I was, I had convinced myself, going mad. Having cast myself out—of home-and-hearth, as from all human contact—I had become in every way imaginable an outcast. Dostoevsky's subterranean man. The ex that prefixes exist.

There is, it bears mention, suicide in my family—my mother's brother (at thirteen, with a .22, to the head)—and while such history, or its spectre, has a way of haunting one's more susceptible moments, I never contemplated cashing myself in. I had peeked at the desolation behind that door years before only to decide at the last possible moment—at such times it always is the last possible moment and one lives in its present perpetually—not to see it through. It simply was not in me. Suicide, permit me to suggest, is an act of vanity, the penultimate gesture of the born narcissist, and while I had, and have, a surplus of the stuff, it is also—let no one tell you differently—an occasion of infernal courage, a gesture of brute bravery. I wanted the mettle, as I hadn't the nerve.
So for the first time in my life I sought help. My therapist was a wise, caring, gentle man, and while he tried—when I scraped fiscal bottom he carried me gratis for months—a year later he had failed to solve me. I continued to dream in words, only now I did so wide awake, this perambulatory radio of the mind, and I powerless to switch it off. I didn't hear voices, no intonation, inflection, insinuation—what I was hearing was characterless, qualityless, robotic, disembodied—I simply heard words, braids and imbrications, interlacings and overleafings, plaited webs and thatched rafts of words, and the organic pacings and tempos of their architecture. Every day deeper into this deep blue sea, its rip tides and undertows. Every day further out, beyond the crest of the next crashing wave, the slough of its swell—bluer, bluing, more blued.

So—isn't it obvious?—I began visiting bowling alleys, dozens of them, month after month. Something about the explosion of the ball and the collision of caroming pins, a sound distinct to my childhood, the only one I could imagine might mute the ones inside my head. I never bowled myself, just sat hunched to whatever bar top I found myself bellied to, nursing a beer and moving my lips to such poetry as I had at hand: Rimbaud and Rilke, Leonard Cohen and Jim Carroll, Heaney and Ashbery and Charles Olson. And Paul Metcalf, with whom I had recently begun a lively and regular correspondence. I read Metcalf—Herman Melville's great-grandson—above all. (A few months later he was dead of a heart attack at the age of eighty-one and I felt not only aggrieved, but oddly accountable.) But eventually it proved too dispiriting. The bowlers began to appear too alien, their displays of team triumph and defeat only underscored my own lack of affect, and at last I ran clean out of bowling alleys. And now I could sense it, the lurking of something hard, and dark as it was cold. It had been decades since I had read, much less thought about Fitzgerald's ‘The Crack-up', but now I began to suspect that this might be something much like that: the pending implosion. Something was inside, something outsized and other, and it was stronger than I was, and more potent, and it meant me only ill. My life—this is precisely what it felt like—had cornered me at last.

Perhaps certain questions suggest themselves: what about religion, for example, or sex, their consolation and refuge, the salvation to be had of their purchase. Although I had once had the former in spadefuls—in my early twenties I had been awarded a scholarship to Vanderbilt Divinity School, one that at the eleventh hour I had chosen not to pursue—in time I had come to travel a different path. I became a journalist, a newspaper reporter, and in the process lost what little faith I once had possessed. I was engaged in ‘real' life in those days, the quotidian issues driving the lives of others, and by the time I threw over my thriving career several years later I had seen far too much of it for it to engage me further. Not that I experienced my loss of faith in any active or meaningful way. God simply, gradually, imperceptibly became as incidental and finally irrelevant to my life as our lives, I am convinced, are to Him. Those who have faith, those who somehow have succeeded in finding the depth and fortitude of character to keep it, doubtless will deem such a declaration exceedingly sad. I do not. The point is, that particular option was closed to me. The despair I was feeling not even Christ might assuage.

As for sex, despite protracted periods of acquiescent celibacy inside my marriage, I had always liked it, the little I had had, and now I missed it, terribly, became, in fact, abstracted by its absence. Sex tends, I think—deplorably—to be taken for granted when one has easy and routine access to it, but when one finds oneself deprived of that access, well, one yearns. All day, every day. At least I do. Did. Unfortunately, while I have always adored women—to a greater extent than I feel kinship with men—I am constitutionally incapable of one-night stands, casual affairs or even what might these days be considered an acceptable level of discreet larking about. Not that I haven't had my opportunities, but I have never failed, save once, to take a rain check. Infidelity, philandering, debauchery, promiscuity, profligacy, skirt-chasing—call it what one will—none were among the reasons my marriage unravelled, though the meagre quantity and quality of the sex certainly was. And my reticence, if that is what it was, had very little to do with epidemiology—with Aids and its lesser cousins—as it had nothing whatever to do with morality. Indeed, what it had to do with, God knows. The point is, that option was not open to me either.

So: suicide, religion, sex. Three strikes, as is said, and you are out. Quite gone. Void of. Bereft. Thrice over.
And then the unthinkable happened, or rather, two things happened. I met someone, a woman, and while I in my recalcitrant fashion followed up on that meeting so that she might eventually save me (as save me she eventually did), my son was becoming—with a vengeance, which is his own fashion, the only fashion he knows, headlong as headstrong in all things—what is called in the parlance, a ‘raver'. And he seemed for the first time in years—he was seventeen by then—happy. Not giddy or euphoric, but content, at peace with himself, within himself. I do not mean to invoke images of Zen and Buddha—my son is roughly as Zen-like as Eminem—but the transformation was as striking as it was palpable, this sea change. Indeed it seemed so definitive that I could not help asking him about it, and when I did, he smiled—I shall always remember that smile, he has the most incandescent smile in the world—and said simply, ‘Uh-huh. I am.' And when I asked him why, what had happened, what accounted, he smiled again and said, ‘Aw, you wouldn't understand. But it's my whole life now. I know why I'm alive.'

I remember my response. And perhaps had I responded in some other way or simply not responded at all, what was about to happen would never have happened. Or perhaps it would have. Perhaps it would have happened anyway. Perhaps it had to happen, and no matter what I said or left unsaid it was going to happen, because that is the way these things happen. What I said was, ‘Congratulations. I'm happy for you. Really. I wish I did.' Because despite everything, my son and I have never withheld, not from one another. He confides, as do I. He tells me things no child ought ever tell a parent, things no parent wants to hear, disgusting things often, morally reprehensible things, nauseatingly cruel things, things that are so appallingly beyond the pale, so rife with risk, rank with recklessness, so absent all human feeling and judgement that I am left, as I seldom am, quite speechless. For one cannot speak when one's teeth are set so on edge, and one is tectonically grinding them.

And so he turned to me and said, ‘Seriously?' And when I answered not only in the affirmative, but the declarative, he told me a story and made me an offer, and so was hatched yet another aspect of our relationship, an aspect that is as wholly illicit as it is morally unsavoury, and one that continues to this day.

We both know it is wrong, this part of it, the arrangement, the dilemma it poses, wrong in the most intimate and unholy of ways, as we both know that neither of us care enough about the fact to do anything about it. Why should we? We have disappointed one another so often in the past that it seems to matter less than not at all. It is a shared shame now, something the two of us have that no one else has, and it has become, like the abiding commonness of our blood, a large and integral part of what bonds us—father and son, parent and child. Perhaps no truth is more momentous, as none more difficult to face, than the blackest, most abject one about oneself. My son supplies me with drugs, with Ecstasy, and if I am to be consigned to perdition, if I am to roast in hell, this, it seems to me, is first among the reasons that I shall do so. And it seems to me, further, that it is one damn fine good reason, because reckoned objectively, it is a horror, it is a latter-day horror story, save that it is not a story, it is not fiction, it is about as far from fiction as one can conceivably get. It is as real and true as it is unthinkable, and there are times when the obscenity of it takes my breath away and dizzies that benighted part of me steeped in self-disgust.

And so the first time I ate E—or X, or EX, or XTC, or MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine) or ADAM—it was owing to my having given my son permission to sell it to me. I became his customer, a buyer, a reliable and steady client, the lowest link on the food chain of the multi-billion dollar commerce that proceeds unabated every day, every hour, in every large city and small town in every state in this union, in what is called by those paid to ‘war' against them, as likewise those who traffic in them, ‘controlled substances'.

You must pardon me—I do not mean to sound smug—but I find it funny. I find it ironic. It tickles and entertains and amuses me. Because I cannot think of a single commodity in our country—one that, meretricious as it may sound, I love dearly, know well and for which my father and his father fought and sacrificed much—that is less controlled than are such substances, nor a single ‘war' that is as pathetically futile, vaingloriously chimeric and long-ago-lost as is this one. It is not that I am unsympathetic to those who, after all, are only doing their jobs (often at grave risk to their lives)—however much I might suggest that such frontline foot soldiers would do better to find another line of work—but I am nothing but unrepentedly hostile towards policies and laws (or rather, the sort of tortured, twisted, two-penny logic that produced and continues to pursue them) that, however well-intentioned, are so indefensibly stupid, monstrously ill-conceived, implicitly dishonest, and, in the impracticability and inequity of their application, as unjust as they are dumb.

[Heretic.Ape.]

I went, only last week, to see the movie Traffic. Fine film, if not nearly so fine as the critics seem to think, but then the critics, as they so often do, miss the point. Traffic is not a movie about the evil of drugs and inhumanity of the drug trade, it is a movie about the idiocy of our drug policy and the evils it not only fosters, but ensures will continue to flower.

Why is this so difficult to apprehend? What prevents us from possessing the humility of character to embrace the lessons hard won of our defeat? Why do we pretend? Is it really necessary to cite statistics or solicit the rhetoric, fatuous as it is fatigued, of ‘experts'? We know better, or ought: the handwriting is on the wall, the toothpaste has vacated the tube, Rome is long since burned to the ground, the Emperor is wearing no clothes, and our folly has returned home to roost. You can fight City Hall, but wrestle as you will, you cannot reform or arrest human appetite any more than you can with a wave of the wand make a gay person straight or summon the voice of God that He might shed the ecumenical light of His omniscience upon the subject.

Ecstasy was made a Schedule One illegal drug—for which we can all thank that cynosure of intellect, Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen—in June of 1985. Which, at present, makes it as illegal as heroin. This, in its preposterous disproportion, is just the sort of run-amock governmental lunacy guaranteed to ensure that those like myself—and more importantly, our children—will write off that same government and those who enforce its drug laws as out of touch, coercive, morally bankrupt and, yes—wake up guys! wake up and smell the poppies!—un-American. Because America is not, or did not use to be, about throwing sixteen-year-old kids in jail for—all in the spirit of free-market capitalism and entrepreneurial enterprise—home-growing a little cannabis, even as the rest of us chain-smoke our Camels, sip our Absoluts with a twist, and devour our Prozac.

Visit a rehab centre sometime. You will learn two things inside that first hour. One, that there are people in this world—some quite admirable, others ostensibly less so—who are more prey to addiction than others; there always have been, always will be, addicts. And two, that the ‘gateway' argument is as simplistic as it is spurious. We are not losing our kids to drugs. We have lost our kids because we haven't the time, inclination, strength of character or political will to do the right thing in their name: to eliminate the black market that so mercilessly exploits them—and the runaway violence it spawns—by legalizing, taxing and regulating the trade.

‘Controlled' substances? That, regrettably, is but a misnomer meriting our laughter, as it ought to occasion our tears. There is no control. There is a bureaucracy, and a so-called policy, and some laws, and the lot is a sham and a smokescreen that increasingly deceives no one. There is but a single way to ‘lick the scourge and eliminate the blight', to win, that is, the so-called war on drugs—to win it so that it might have some chance, however slim, of staying won—and that way consists of two words, words that are more American than any two of which I can conceive (save, perhaps, ‘Uncle Sam'): Wall Street.

But then, who cares what I think? Anybody can think anything about everything, as everybody inevitably does. I pretend to no monopoly of wisdom upon the subject. But I know something of Ecstasy, perhaps I even know a lot, or more than most, and certainly more than most of a certain age, which is to say, a comparable, middling one. And what I know I know because I have eaten and continue to eat so much of it. I am an experienced, seasoned, veteran eater of E—I would not hazard a guess as to the exact quantity, though it is fair to say a lot—and it is a fact of which I am neither proud nor mortified.

So here, in a word, a most sober, solemn, even a sombre word, is what I know: yum.

Ecstasy is delicious. Or, put it another way, Ecstasy is delicious and I recommend highly, loudly and long that everyone whose health—physical and psychological—does not contraindicate or preclude its ingestion, ought to ingest it. Young/old, man/woman, rich/poor, gay/straight, black/white, saint/sinner, genius/dolt, Christian and Jew and Muslim, Democrat, Republican and Independent, lawmaker and lawbreaker, heartbreaker and soulshaker, the sexually degenerate and sexually celibate, the whole damn Rainbow Coalition. (Am I being deliberately provocative? Of course. As I am being entirely serious.)

Go out, I admonish you, all of you, hie thyselves thither, hit the streets or collar that neighbourhood kid, drum up a contact, do a deal, repair thyselves home, soften the lights, put on some music—the best stuff—pour yourself a pitcher of ice water, perhaps two, keep a tin of Altoids handy, as well as a tube of Vicks Inhalant and a couple of packs of mineral ice, make yourself comfortable, lay back and…swallow.

Swallow that pill, let it slide, feel the glide, and relax. Quiet your mind. Calm your soul. An hour from now, perhaps somewhat less, you are going to experience something you have never experienced before. You are going to experience something you will never forget. You are going to experience something that shall forever change such time as remains to you on this earth. You are going to experience something that will halve your life into before and after: BE/AE. You are going to experience something that is, every second of it, delicious—deliciously, positively, unprecedentedly w-o-n-d-e-r-f-u-l.

It is your self-anointing, and I envy you it. I envy you that first time. So relish it, savour, languish in, treasure. Consecrate it, that sacred four hours. You have just swallowed wonder, ambrosia and mead, you have partaken of lustre and grace.

Just make certain that before you swallow you know that the pill is authentic, genuine, the real deal, the goods, and not some innocuous rip-off or inimical knock-off. Do that, and the rest, as they say, is a piece of cake, a piece of cake that, in this instance, is like no other you have ever tasted. Think of the best day of your life, or recall the sweetest, purest, most special thing along the way—person, place, moment, memory, sentiment, experience, accomplishment. Got it? Now multiply that tenfold. That does not begin to describe how impossibly delicious E is.
I am not unaware of how redolent this is of Timothy Leary's often loopy proselytizing for LSD, and I know how out of step is the sort of ethos he once so widely touted—turn on, tune in, drop out—but this has nothing to do with that. Ecstasy is a clarifier. That, ultimately, is its value. That it enables one to see, feel and think, if not more deeply, then certainly more clearly. That it clears the deck of all that is unclear that one might more clearly—and immediately—experience that clarity. And not just in the moment. The high, as all highs do, subsides, but the clarity, the lucidity lingers. The residue of the roll.

In that sense, not to mention in its chemical composition, it is quite the opposite of LSD, which at the peak of its use came cauled—for all I know, still does; I never have used LSD and am possessed of no inclination to do so—in all sorts of religious accoutrements and connotations. (One does not, by the way, hallucinate on E, not even mildly, at least I never have. Nor does one become or perceive oneself as having become someone or something else. One remains indubitably oneself, just vastly, profoundly more so.) Ecstasy has nothing to do with religion, save to make clear to its user that such religion—the questing after something more or higher, the meaning of god and existence, the miracle of faith, call it what you will—while understandable (a whole lot is understandable on E, a lot more than is understandable off of it), is mainly nonsense. There is no need to quest, not any more, for what is being quested after is right here, right now—the birth of a state of better being.

Ecstasy is a clarifier, but it is a personal clarifier. It is not—despite all the peace/love/unity/respect hype surrounding it—a universal one. Its lessons may be universal in their implications, but they are intended to be applied to oneself, not to be shared with one's neighbour, friends, colleagues or community. Which is not to say that the drug does not have its social dimensions or that one ought not do E in the company of others. Indeed I would not find it congenial to do, nor have I ever done it, alone. (As close as I ever came was on an unpeopled, night-time side street in downtown London, and it was raining, and it was one of the memorable experiences of my life—neon, glistening, menthol, veneered in layer after thickening layer of thick honey. Lovely streets, London, and lovely, so lovely, its rain.)

But better by far to do it with those one loves, and best of all with one's one-and-only lover. The point is, one must do it oneself to truly ‘get it'. Listening to the stories and anecdotes of others or such lessons as they may have drawn from the experience, reading an article such as this one certainly does no harm, but everyone takes from E something different, something as uniquely, idiosyncratically private as the person taking it. And if what one takes in the broadest sense is all about human connection and empathy—E has proven highly effective in certain kinds of couples therapy—it is all the more about connecting with and feeling empathy for oneself. It is, contrary to its image as the current drug of choice among teenagers and the prevalence of its use at their bacchanalian, all-night, tribal dance rites—their ‘raves'—the most intimate of drugs.

I did it my first time with the woman I mentioned earlier, the one who saved me. It was her first time as well. Neither of us used or so much as experimented with illegal drugs—we typically limited ourselves to wine, beer and cigarettes, and those in moderation—and we were, as zero hour approached, visibly apprehensive, an attitude, I think, that is healthy, as it is only sane. Perhaps—who knows?—it even exaggerated the impact of what was about to occur.
It was, in our case, a pair of Calvin Kleins. EX comes in a variety of shapes, sizes, colours and brand names—Nikes, Mitsubishis, Motorolas, Versaces, Rolling Stones, etc.—thousands of types, each with their subtle distinctions with respect to the quality and length of the roll. I recall their being round, perhaps oblong, about the size of a Tylenol, smaller, and of some somehow comforting amber hue. As I say, I was too apprehensive to register all of the details. My heart, its thumpeting, was in the way.

We had cleared our schedules ahead of time, switched off the phones, and we were in her home, just the two of us, in our bathrobes, in the living room, on the couch—a couch, it is fit to say, with which we were by that time well acquainted. Van was on the stereo, Astral Weeks, Moondance, Common One, The Best of: Volume One. A fire was roaring in the fireplace and we were feeding it. The lamp on the end table was turned way down low. It was mid-evening, and we had ready, as my son had taken care to instruct us, our pair of tumblers and pitchers of iced-down spring water. E increases body temperature and heart rate and elevates blood pressure, so drinking water—not beer, not liquor—is pro forma as one rolls along. And one wishes to drink, because E causes dehydration—one of its most immediate side effects is dry mouth. (Interesting, because what it does to one's emotions is precisely the opposite. It lubricates them, emulsifies, one's feelings as gels and butters and lotions.)
With much mutually nervous, serio-comic, ceremonial chit-chat, then, we each popped our pill, swallowed, waited, and—nothing.

We locked eyes. We still were alive. I think we were only half amazed. I know we were relieved. Van was still belting as only Van can. If I was dying I knew that this was how I wanted to do it; I can think of worse voices to hear with one's dying breath than that of the Belfast Cowboy's wailing, ‘It's too late to stop now!' as indeed at that moment it was. (The young are partial to other ways: techno, electronica, trance, jungle, house, hardcore, gabba, drum and bass, and they are not, I might suggest to those of another, older generation, to my generation, without their merits. Indeed, they constitute the very aural-assault, awash-in-the-sonics brand of music tailor-made to maximize the benefits of a certain kind of more, shall we say, kinetic experience. To each their own.)

Typically, it takes a while for Ecstasy to kick in. Thirty-five minutes is precipitous, that twice over dilatory. It depends—on the pill, mainly, but also on the contents of one's stomach (empty is better than full), on one's mood (up is better than down), on one's physical/mental state (alert is better than exhausted). So, that first time, you sit and wonder, precisely because you have the time to do so, if what is going to happen really is going to happen, and if it does, just when it may occur, and how you will know. And then it does, the roll begins—the world around you billows open like an eye—and you stop wondering those things. You stop on a dime and you go, or rather, are lifted and taken—coronaed, crowned, coroneted, spangled and lantern-lit, your smiling face flambeaued as a thousand chandeliers.

One of the most discernible early effects—it happened that first time, though often it does not, being a function of the chemical composition of the pill—is what I have heard described as ‘fluttery' vision, but which I prefer to describe as ‘staggered' or ‘ratcheted' or ‘toggled'. This phenomenon is as close to an hallucinatory quality as E produces, and it is so mild—and weirdly pleasant—that to label it as such is frankly inaccurate. When it happened to us we knew it immediately—that is, we knew something was going on, something…extra—and we looked at one another, smiled, and virtually in unison commented upon it. As I recall—we are both fifty years old, remember—we thought it ‘cool'.
It is a little difficult to describe. One's vision does not blur, nor do images get darker or lighter, pulse, expand or contract, fragment or disintegrate, or change colour, but they do get a little, I suppose choppy is the word, choppy but not chopped up. That is, they remain intact and stationary—a lamp's a lamp, a window's a window, a fire's a fire—they just move a little, as if jagged were a verb, within the texture of their own lines. These striations. Very unthreatening, and very, well, cool. (Rad. Phat. Whatever.) There is bound to be a medical explanation for it, perhaps there is even a name, but I remain ignorant of such and so intend to remain.

And then suddenly Van was singing waaaaay over there, and then waaaaay inside here, right inside, ground zero, the very epicentre, the pith of my brain, pathing through, yet way outside and up above and down below and all around as well, vaulting in dips, convolving in loops, volplaning, vanplaning, brimming up, pouring forth, washing over and enveloping the room even as he filled and spanned and embraced in the spread of the swoon of his voice, the wings of its swanning, every corner and corridor and cubbyhole of the house inside my head. This capacious passing through of each and every note of his music, not only as sound, but as resonant space—particle, wave—and as I have learned since, time. And that also was. Cool.

What happened next was that everything and all at once, while clearly remaining itself, its old self, at the same time not became, but was its altered self, transfigured, transmogrified, a new self, a simultaneously deeper and higher, older and newer self, and so a better self—everything smoother and softer and rounder, every edge bull-nosed, every surface sanded. And warmer. Which was curious. Because it didn't feel warmer, it just looked warmer. But as much as the surroundings…bloomed, it was in myself that the blossoming burgeoned, surged, swelled, an harmonic wind of well-being, cognate and congruent, and in its passage, home—the world as nest, and as womb.

In any event, the world was suddenly guilt- and worry- and wrinkle-free, palpably, beautifully buoyant—visually, texturally, aurally—transcendently right and renewed, arresting and exquisite and sublime and glorious and divine (sometimes words are paltry things, such puny things), more of any and all of those things than I had ever thought possible. Or perhaps I had thought them possible, and perhaps that is part of the point: that whatever beautiful thing one can imagine or has ever imagined, it is that much more beautiful on E. I cannot prove this theory, and it would mean that those with more active or fecund or developed imaginations are likely to have better, more maximally beautiful experiences. Or perhaps it is simply that they are more acutely attuned to the beauty of those experiences. As I say, I cannot prove this, and I can conceive of no plausible way of doing so. (It is similar to the old conundrum about whether the more well-endowed man has the more intense orgasm. But how to measure such a thing? There is not, nor can there ever be a basis for comparison.) All the same, the proposition feels right to me.

And so we looked at one another and felt one another, with our fingers and our lips and our tongues, indeed with the whole of our new-found faces, this plumbing of the new map of our bodies—new softer hair, new smoother flesh, new pinker, fresher, more fragrant, shimmering, altogether fluffier genitalia (fluffier is precisely the word)—and we smelled and tasted one another—she smelled of burst peaches and tasted as the recent salts of pearls—because one's sense of smell and taste is no less augmented and intensified, honed and heightened than are the other senses. That is, we bathed in one another, each of our five senses, the ten in all, because that commingling is what had taken place, its rhapsody, and humanity, and caress. And as the world includes oneself, and as at that moment it included my lover, we looked to one another exactly as we felt and smelled and tasted: rapturous, heavenly, transcendent, numinous, aglow. She a resplendent, bejewelled goddess, I a radiant god. ‘Their eyes came open into the soul of the other,' Don DeLillo once wrote of a kindred experience, the ‘flow of time'. That, in so many words, is, to a very serif, how it was.
Later, if still in midstream, I got up, walked to the bathroom—walking on E is no more difficult than walking on water or floating on air—and looked in the mirror. I wanted to see what I looked like—I am just vain enough that the thought occurred to me even in the midst of the roll—though I already had seen reflected in my lover's eyes that I looked sufficiently, there is no other word, gorgeous. (If I looked half as gorgeous as she did to me I reckoned I was in for a treat.) And the person I saw looking back at me was, gorgeous, but gorgeous in a way that floored almost as much as it thrilled me.

[Heretic.Ape.]

As I have mentioned, I am almost fifty years old, and here, now, as I stared grinning in astonishment, I looked twenty-eight. And not some fifty-year-old version of myself at twenty-eight, but me the way I was back then, back when, when I was twenty-eight. I moved closer, peered harder. I could scarcely believe it. I had recaptured myself. Dorian Gray. Fountain of Youth. Foods of the Gods. Spontaneous regeneration. Metempsychosis. Somehow I had been restored, and I felt what I can only describe as an all-consuming nostalgia for the present.

And then, after helping each other off with our bathrobes, our old, nubby, cotton-twill bathrobes—suddenly spun of the finest cashmere and angelica, these clouds of talcum and down—we embraced, and kissed, and more, we got down, as is said, and as used to be said, to business, and she whispered in my ear: ‘We've found fucking gold.'

It distinctly was not an out-of-the-body experience, as it was not a mind-expanding one.

It distinctly was a further-into-the-body experience, and a mind-clarifying one. An impenetrably penetrating experience. An excavation of the self. An exhumation of the other. Because that is how one finds gold—one exhumes it, excavates, one digs for it, deep, and deeper.

And so we did. We dug. For four hours we dug, sinking further into each other, as likewise into ourselves, and eventually, after four hours of digging, digging that was in its every decline mutually synchronized, after four hours that felt exactly like forty minutes—for on E, unlike, say, on grass, time flies, sails by, condensed, abbreviated, attenuated and tremendously foreshortened—we found it. Only it wasn't gold. It was something far better. It was sex, the very EX in sex—and the climb and climax of sex—as revelation. And as soul.

So I take it back. Maybe Ecstasy does have something to do with religion, although the word spirit seems to me a more felicitous fit, because the peace one feels, and the insights one gains—epiphanies may be a better word—are no less than oceanic. They are tidal, as they are catholic. You know, afterwards, that you contain oceans, oceans you previously had but the faintest inkling existed, and that those oceans are filled with beauty and grace and light and love—more words, bankrupt words—and that they are yours, yours to share as it may please and delight you.

And this, I might argue, is not a bad thing. Indeed it is so much the opposite of a bad thing that I believe it is worth the cost of that which one must pay to purchase it. Because there is a cost, that cost is high, it is as expensive as it is extravagant, and much like the experience itself, it is one which varies with each occasion as it fluctuates with each person who encounters that dark piper.

The simple truth is, when you eat Ecstasy, you are deliberately messing with your mind, or more accurately your brain, or more accurately still your brain chemistry. You are releasing, in a rush, as a deluge or monsoon—and that rush is unnatural, unnatural in the sense that had God intended you to experience it it would not require a flock of white-coated ‘cookers' in a clandestine laboratory someplace in Holland or Israel or France to design and customize a pill for you to do so, nor would the delivery and distribution of those pills so lavishly profit the Mob—you are, as I say, triggering a veritable tsunami of serotonin, the human body's pleasure juice, that in turn floods in the most sensory, sentient way your consciousness, which in turn turns everything ‘gold', or rather, golden. (Again, there is available—there always is—an exact, physiological explanation of the phenomenon and the anatomical circuitry and neural pathways involved, and again I have no interest in pursuing it. Why demystify what is in its sum, if not its parts, so mystical?) And in the wake of that rush—not the day after perhaps, when you are still basking, deliciously exhausted in its afterglow (albeit that a deep, sub-muscular, burning neck, shoulder and back discomfort often compromise it), but the day after that, or the next, or the next, what I have heard described as ‘Black Tuesday'—you run the risk not only of emotionally crashing, but of feeling so rawly depleted (because your tank of serotonin is running on no more than fumes), that you are tempted to pledge, ‘I have never felt this awful in my life, as empty, hollowed, flat, so soulless and lost to myself, so amputated and abscissed, so emotionally exsanguinated, and I shall never, not ever, do this again.' And also, ‘Whatever was I thinking?'

My advice, for what it is worth: wait a minimum of four weeks, the time purportedly required for one's serotonin to refill its reservoir and your thoughts and feelings to sort themselves through and get up and running again, before repeating the performance. Do it more often than that, get too greedy, and the upshot is ‘E-tardism'—a trimming down, clipping-off and curbing of the drug's effects, not to mention possible long-term damage to the serotonergic nerve grid of the brain, damage of the sort that may leave you so addled, you will find it not only a full-time challenge to control your own drool, but to recall that words are composed of letters and that each represents an actual sound, one intended to be pronounced aloud. So: moderation in all things, even things that are excessively restorative, for on occasion, cures do kill.

But here is the Catch-22 with which one inevitably must grapple, or at least I did, and still do: what one thinks—if one stops to think about it—is precisely this: ‘What is a mind, if not something to be messed with? What is consciousness, if not a state to be altered?' I mean this quite seriously, quite literally, and if it helps to substitute for the phrase ‘messed with' the word ‘clarified' or ‘purified' or ‘alchemized' or ‘beautified' or ‘beatified' then perhaps my meaning is taken. A mind is a terrible thing to waste, and there is much being wasted when one deliberately chooses not to explore the ecstasy of its deeper horizons.

‘Everyone is doing the best he can to keep the dark/from climbing over his back,' Charlie Smith writes in his brilliant new collection of poems, Heroin. ‘Life should be ecstasy,' Allen Ginsberg told an interviewer before his death. They are right. In our way, we are all doing our best to dodge the dark while clearing a space where a little ecstasy might be permitted to bloom. I am only suggesting that our best can be still better, and that there exists this way of making it so, and that it is ours for the literal taking.

Perhaps there are those who feel no need to do so, to experience such ecstasy, that they are blessed with a sufficiency of it in their daily lives. Perhaps there are those who feel that such ecstasy, because it is ‘unnatural', induced artificially, chemically, ‘under the influence', cannot possibly be ‘existentially authentic', and must therefore be false, a fraud and a lie, and that it cannot possibly be sustained. Perhaps there are those who suspect that the disparity is too great, that having experienced such ecstasy, they will find it too daunting to endure the rigours and asperities of a mundane, largely prosaic, often overwhelmingly corrupt and ugly world. Perhaps there are those who feel that such ecstasy cannot be reconciled with their religious, political, philosophical or domestic agendas, that it threatens or violates the very essence of that in which they are so wholly invested. Perhaps there are those who are reluctant to risk engaging in what our culture defines as socially unacceptable, even legally trangressive behaviour. Perhaps there are those who are afraid of footing the physical and emotional toll, or of becoming psychologically addicted. And perhaps there are those who simply, unapologetically, are flat-out scared. Scared of beauty. And of bliss.

There are such people, and they are most people, almost all people, and they have every right to their feelings and beliefs, values and convictions. They are, after all, but the sum of having lived lives that are unimaginable to any of us but those who have honourably lived them. I know, because I was, for most of my own, one of them.

I am not any more, one of them. I am not one of anything. I am, trite as it may sound, simply me, and here lately, that is more than enough. It is plenty. And there is something else, a secret: there are times, once a month, sometimes more or less, when the truth of that makes me, well, ecstatic.

My son? He is nineteen now, and in his spare time—having some months ago kicked the Ecstasy habit himself—he spins mixes at raves, and this fall he is entering college, quite a reputable college, as a Psychology major. And he is writing poetry again. Brilliant stuff, more brilliant than ever. This righting of his ship, and the compass of its course.

Minor triumphs perhaps. Still, it does make one wonder. Would he have made it back intact without E? Would he have arrived at that which all of us deserve and so few manage to find, his chance for happiness? And it makes one wonder, too, you know, about what they say: Better living through chemistry.

[Alfa]

I want some line breaks, before I read this.

[Heretic.Ape.]

line breaks?
Edit: is that what you had in mind?

[Alfa]

LOL, I suspect you are thinking too drug oriented apeman. I was talking about paragraph breaks, instead of big chunks of text. Other than that, I do not do lines.

[OzzBozz]

i enjoyed reading that
it took awhile
but thats great about you and your son

SWIM has no experience in MDMA, but is very interested in it and will be experiencing it soon.

[IntrepidTraveler]

great read man, gold star

[Bajeda]

Perhaps there are those who feel no need to do so, to experience such ecstasy, that they are blessed with a sufficiency of it in their daily lives. Perhaps there are those who feel that such ecstasy, because it is ‘unnatural', induced artificially, chemically, ‘under the influence', cannot possibly be ‘existentially authentic', and must therefore be false, a fraud and a lie, and that it cannot possibly be sustained. Perhaps there are those who suspect that the disparity is too great, that having experienced such ecstasy, they will find it too daunting to endure the rigours and asperities of a mundane, largely prosaic, often overwhelmingly corrupt and ugly world. Perhaps there are those who feel that such ecstasy cannot be reconciled with their religious, political, philosophical or domestic agendas, that it threatens or violates the very essence of that in which they are so wholly invested. Perhaps there are those who are reluctant to risk engaging in what our culture defines as socially unacceptable, even legally trangressive behaviour. Perhaps there are those who are afraid of footing the physical and emotional toll, or of becoming psychologically addicted. And perhaps there are those who simply, unapologetically, are flat-out scared. Scared of beauty. And of bliss.

That sounds exactly like a particular train of thought my rattlesnake has contemplated numerous times while attempting to understand why so many people have an intransigent fear of mind expansion and utilizing drugs to explore the soul.


This was a bit long winded, but very well written.