ForEverAfter
Ex-Bluelighter
Alcohol, Mushrooms, Speed, Weed, Nitrous & DXM - "Tequila Mockingbird"
Part of this has been posted before. It was incomplete at the time, and I was told it’d be better off as a journal entry. Now that I have finished writing it, more or less, I think it functions as a trip report; or, a series of trip reports that function as a whole. The quality and style of the writing varies according to mood and drug. It is a long report, over forty-nine thousand words and counting. Some details are less interesting than others. They have been included for the purpose of context; and, because editing would be a lie. Some sections are written under the influence of drugs, but most of it is the product of alcohol. After a particularly intense trip, documented here: http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/threads/612871-(P-Subs-dried-6.6-g-DXM-HBi-600-mg)-Veteran-Leap-Year, I decided to take a break from drugs…
10th March, 2012 (Ten Days without Mushrooms)
I was supposed to quit all psychedelics for six weeks. Weed was a pipe dream, though. Complete abstinence from psychedelics wasn’t likely; I knew that from the beginning. So far, I haven't gone one day without smoke. This failure: I justified it by forcing myself to refrain from tripping; my inability to quit smoking weed would go hand in hand with my ability to resist the mushroom. In the end, I would be consuming less, which is better than a kick in the dick with a steel-capped boot. Failing completely was too depressing a notion to even consider. Another failure, another stain on my conscience: the dirty rag that absorbs all of my spilled, and forgotten, dreams; my endlessly faithful inner voice. The little version of me with wings and a halo: it never gives up; no matter how much neglect I inflict upon myself. It says, without a quiver of doubt, that I will succeed one day; all evidence to the contrary. It tells me all is not lost, when nothing good can be found. My conscience, it enables me; it is the thin film between my descent and the rocks at the bottom.
I never made any effort to deal with the withdrawals I experienced from my epic mushroom binge; instead, I distracted myself with non-psychedelics. Alcohol – being the only thing readily available to me – replaced the hallucinogenic mushrooms; my vow to never drink again, defeated by my decision to stop tripping: sixty-five alcohol-free days, down the drain. But the sauce didn’t satisfy me like it used to. I found myself, after little over two month’s absence, genuinely not wanting to return to drunkenness; the bar for recreational-drugs having been raised significantly by a psychedelic binge from hell. Compensation, if it were to exist, had to come from something else; something stronger; something capable of smothering my anxiety.
The choice was obvious; the next drug on my to-do list: heroin. But I didn’t seek it out; I continued to drink, emptying bottle after bottle of beer. To score would require hitting the streets and picking up off someone I didn’t know. The idea tortured me. It lingered in my brain, calling me a coward; laughing. The little version of me with horns and a tail, reminding me that my true desires had once again been outnumbered by my fears; reminding me that I am a failure.
Days went by without mushrooms, but I continued to hallucinate. Without alcohol, my anxieties resurfaced – so I tried to stay drunk as much as possible; my desire to get some gear rising with every sip. Until, finally, I reached my breaking point.
Wandering back and forth on the platform, fuelled by frustrations; my mind an endless mess of overlapping and contradicting thoughts: I had no idea what I was doing. Whether I should appear anxious, like I’m already addicted, or calm so as not to create any suspicion; whether I should talk to people or just tried to establish eye contact; what terminology I should use; how much it was going to cost: these questions had no answers. And, consequently, I had no approach.
At one point I was sitting on a train, eavesdropping on two smacked out goons talking about how fucked up they were; just as I was about to say something to them, they started boasting loudly about their exploits robbing and assaulting people. This was the closest I came to approaching someone, before returning home a failure. I couldn’t bring myself to buy a six pack of beer on the way back; alcohol, the consolation prize, was a fucking insult.
Back home, the jar of mushrooms kept popping into my head; I couldn’t shake it: tripping was inevitable without a suitable replacement. I had a choice. To return to the land of psychedelics and, by doing so, give up on the idea of a sober day; or go back out there and find some fucking smack: in my mind, heroin being the only thing to save me from my addictions. The opiate world is unfamiliar territory; heroin is, yet, untainted by my recklessness. I have abused everything else beyond repair; ruined entire classes of drugs. Opiates remain pure, untarnished, and, therefore, guilt-free. The decision to move on to heroin is a good one. I don’t have a smack problem yet; so, using is not yet an issue. Under the guise of convincing myself I can use drugs responsibly, I have a whole new class of drugs to explore and ruin. I smoke three joints and get on a train to the city.
Richmond station is crowded with football folk; true blue Australians dressed head to toe with merchandise. Colour-coded beanies, jerseys and flags; their faces painted to match. These sports enthusiasts, they make my mission impossible. So, I start walking.
I mean to head towards the city, but I’m too stoned to think properly. I walk for twenty minutes in the wrong direction, half-aware that I’m off-track. Upon realizing my mistake, I turn around to see the silhouette of Melbourne’s skyscrapers. The city, it is huge; I have been walking aimlessly away from these enormous structures, practically oblivious. I laugh at myself.
On the way back towards the station, I duck into a bottle-o and buy a beer. It’s a good costume for someone who definitely isn’t a narc; cops don’t walk around drinking beer in the middle of the afternoon, regardless of their position regarding cover. Continuing to drink throughout the mission was all part of the strategy. Getting pissed, while stoned, in the middle of a hunt for heroin; it is the only way to resist temptation. I am quitting mushrooms; I am doing a good thing.
I walk down the street, listening to the Velvet Underground, drinking beer, and scanning faces for likely drug-dealers. I ask a couple of harmless-looking people. I know they won’t be able to help me; I ask them, so I can go home telling myself that I tried: predictably, they brush me off. Some of them are disgusted by the very notion; a junky, actually talking to them, asking them for gear. I guess the implication is that if I ask them, they too look like junkies. And nobody wants that.
I throw my empty beer into an alleyway. A homeless man asks me for change. I offer him two dollars for a tip on where to score some smack. He tells me to go down to Victoria Street. He says to get on the Church Street tram and follow it to the end of the line; I walk, instead, drinking beer after beer as I go. The alcohol combines nicely with the weed.
Wandering through darkening streets full of drunken maniacs, I feel good; my mind is protected by a sedative cloud. By the time I reach my destination, I feel like actually going through with it. Fuck the consequences. But it’s not as easy as all that.
The homeless man led me to a fortress; a series of high-rise buildings, government commissioned flats. This place, this retirement home for the perpetually downtrodden, it requires a key-card to get through the doors. I watch a junky scan himself through a series of entry-points to reach the elevator; concluding that there is no way to get in. I keep walking, down Victoria Street. Everybody that walks past me has this look about them, like they just got out of prison.
I keep my mouth shut. Asking them would be suicide. That’s what my mind told me anyway. These people, they aren’t even human beings; they’re animals waiting for feeding time. They want me to give them an excuse. Just because they’re Maori or Vietnamese, doesn’t make them a fucking drug dealer. And, I should know that. Fucking racist little spoilt white cunt that I am. That’s what they say, in my dramatization, before they stab me to death with a biro and piss on my corpse. If I’m going to ask someone, seriously, it needs to be a white guy. And, he needs to be smaller than me.
I walk into a pub and grab another beer, drinking as I continue on my journey. By this point my left foot is starting to hurt from over-exertion. I have been walking for hours, non-stop, with nothing to eat or drink but beer. I am exhausted and dehydrated; the roof of my mouth sticks to my tongue and my tongue sticks to my teeth. Just as I’m about to give up, I see a skinny junky-looking guy stumbling through traffic towards me. His girlfriend is holding a long-neck. They are both fucked off their brains on amphetamines. I stop them and ask if they can help me get some smack.
Their faces light up. They say, “We’re glad to help; you asked the right person.” The guy took the reins from then on. He told me everything about himself. He boasted being a member of a bike gang; boasted that he beats the shit out of people on a regular basis. I took it with a grain of salt. The guy, he’s smaller than me. And I’m fucking small.
We walk around Richmond looking for smack. He tells me that he can get me some gear but it’d be much easier to get some speed. I tell him I don’t want speed, but – honestly – at this point, I’ll take what I can get. I want to fucking get off. I want some serious chemicals. He says, “Heroin dealers; they’re kind of weird.” I tell him, I know; paranoid fuckers, smack dealers. Especially when they’re dealing with somebody like me: halfway between junky and narc. I’m hard to place. I don’t fit the usual junky bill. On the other hand, I don’t look like a narc either. Narcs are fucking incompetent. They’ve got no idea how to integrate themselves into the scene.
We travel about, him telling me stories, me acting aloof. He tries to scare me, not because he’s a scary cunt but because he’s not. He makes up for his apparent accessibility by acting up the psychotic angle. He tells me about Chopper Reed, like that’s supposed to startle me or something. Everybody in Melbourne has a story about Chopper Reed. Most of them are as believable as Chopper’s stories. If anything, the mention of the phony cunt gets me thinking that this guy’s not so bad; that he’s just a lackey. Chopper is the kind of criminal-icon, that people who aren’t criminals associate with criminality. He’s an entry level nut-job. I know this. I’ve heard hundreds of Chopper stories that are supposed to startle me; they don’t.
The story keeps changing. He says we’re going to get so much speed or so much smack, then he contradicts himself. He’s fucked off his head. He doesn’t know what he’s saying, but he knows that he wants to impress me. His girlfriend, or whatever the fuck she is, she keeps to herself; she gives me these smug looks like I’m out of my element. Like, I don’t know what’s going on. In reality I’m on top of shit, and they aren’t.
The mission goes on, and on, and on. We run into this guy on Victoria street who looks like he has some sort of serious medical condition. His right shoulder is much higher than his left; his eyes keep darting about in his head like ping pong balls. He tells us, he can get us some speed. I tell my new friend: I don’t want any fucking speed. I want some smack. Regardless we go on a little detour with this disabled looking mother fucker: wandering through tiny streets; interacting with junkies. Eventually my new friend says, “Fuck this.” He tells me that we’re on a goose chase. That this cunt, the one that looks like he has a mild case of cerebral palsy, is going to fuck us.
We say goodbye to that mission and return to the original one. Meanwhile, I start to become anxious. Despite the beer and the weed, I am getting a little concerned. This is not my territory. I am a human on an alien planet. These people, they are unrecognizable to me. They are all freaks.
My new friend, he tells me we’re almost there. He’s always saying that, though. We’re almost there. We’re almost there. Like a fucking broken record. He recognizes my apprehension and is amused by it. They both are: husband and wife; Mr and Mrs Junky. I don’t give up. I don’t call it quits. This mission, I have decided, will end one way or another.
At one point I hear this smacking sound. Flesh against flesh. I turn back to see Mrs Junky pounding a fist into the palm of her hand. It’s supposed to frighten me; it does. But I keep going. There’s no turning back now. I didn’t do all of this for nothing. Mr Junky, he tells me we have to go down some alleyway to get to where we’re going. I tell him I’d rather take the long way. He says okay like a man pats a dog; he says okay but I know, he doesn’t mean it.
After some time, we get to the alleyway. It’s not as bad as I fantasized. It’s well-lit; a short passage through the fortress. This halfway house that my new friend lives in, we meander through it; past police, which he denies exist. The police are clearly the major source of his paranoia. In between denials of the blue and white checkers, he gets seriously concerned. Mrs Junky has long since departed. When she left, I figured she didn’t want to witness the crime; that she didn’t want to see her boyfriend, or whatever the fuck, beat the shit out of some poor cunt. But the thing is I’m ready to beat the shit out of him. I’m ready to take a punch in the face and send one back, his way. Prior to arriving in the alleyway, I take off my glasses and put them in my pocket so they don’t break against his knuckles. But, to my surprise, there is no fist fight.
This guy I met on the street, he leads me into a dim-lit flat. He tells me before we get there that I should give him my cash. I say no. I say, fuck that, I’m not giving up my hard earned dollars to someone I just me. No offence and what not. He keeps trying to convince me to give him the cash. He says this guy, the speed dealer, is fucking paranoid as shit. I tell him I don’t give a fuck. I’m not handing over notes on the street to someone I just met. No offence and what not. He accepts this.
We get inside and the cunt is as paranoid as he described. He keeps eyeing me like I’m a fucking narc. The whole time, he’s looking at me waiting to pounce; waiting to pull a knife; waiting to make some signal to his dodgy friends sitting in the dark corners of his flat. These guys they don’t say anything, even when spoken to. They are like statues; ominous fucking statues. Still, I keep my cool. I don’t react. I just keep going for the junk, like junkies do.
The countertop is covered with some kind of slime. The dealer, he grabs a rag and wipes it down smearing the slime across the linoleum in streaks. Then, he plops down a pair of scales and weighs us up. My anxiety is decreasing. I realise, in this moment, that I’m not some fucking mark. My new friend, he hasn’t been lying. He hasn’t been setting me up to get fucked over. This: is just a deal.
We get our bags and go back to the fortress. My new friend, he lives up there; near the top floor. I walk with him past the endless series of security checks; up a slow moving elevator, to his front door. His apartment is hardly furnished. There is rubbish lying everywhere; dirty dishes towering over the sink: it reminds me of home.
He starts stressing about the whereabouts of a spoon, then he realizes it is at the bottom of the pile of unwashed dishes. Reaching his hand into the sink full of stagnant dish water he produces a rusty looking spoon. He tells me that I can whack up too. He doesn’t mind. I say, “No thanks, man. I’m alright.” I make up some excuse about having limited time, which he accepts because I have an honorary degree in lying; I should’ve been a lawyer.
Leading up to this moment, he’s been telling me that he’s a doctor. He’s so good at hitting veins that he’s some kind of God. I take it with the same grain of salt that I take everything he says. Until I see him do it. He rolls up his sleeve to reveal a big fucking hole in his arm. And I mean big, like Requiem for a Dream size. The needle slips in and out in three seconds. Blood flows into the chamber like he’s turning on a tap. And it’s done. But that’s not good enough for him. He’s been shooting speed for three days, without sleep. Mrs Junky confirmed this earlier.
There are no other tracks on his arm; just one big fucking hole, like an orifice. He squirts more water into the spoon and mops a bit of cotton around to get the last bits. Slams the pick into the same hole and shoots up again. He looks at me like I should give him some of my bag. I look at him like there’s no way in fucking hell that’s going to happen. He understands. Before I leave, he tries to sell me a baseball cap, clearly stolen, then a pair of shoes. I tell him, no thanks.
Back on the street, his mind is racing faster than minds should race. Even on speed. He’s fucking off the planet. He’s trying to operate a mobile phone but it is confusing the fuck out of him. He asks me to do it for him. I say no. He asks a passer-by. The guy takes one look at him and tells him that the cops have just pulled up; there is an empty police car on the side of the road. My new friend, he doesn’t see it as empty; his overworked brain imagines policemen sitting in the driver and passenger, waiting to tag us. He tells me to stash my bag, so – infused with his paranoia – I pull the two points of speed out of my pocket and shove it into my underwear. I can feel it, this little bit of plastic, under my dick. When we get to the next corner he says, “I’ve got to go this way,” and we depart. I reach out my hand to say thanks but he refuses, frightened that the invisible policemen might see us shake and conclude that it is some kind of deal.
It is the same bathroom I have injected in thousands of times. The same bathroom I collapsed a vein. I am drunk, again, so I have to be careful. I try a couple of veins under my elbow, resting the pick against the muscles in my forearm. It doesn’t work. They’ve shrunk, either that or I’m just pissed; probably both. After a couple of failed attempts I decide to mimic the doctor. This crazed speed freak junky that I met on Victoria Street; I recreate his shot. And it works perfectly.
My mind is clear. There is no anxiety. No withdrawals from other shit. I am a fucking skyscraper. I am God. I am everything. I start racing around the room like a fly confined by architecture. Then, quickly, I mix up the rest of the bag. The second shot is as perfect as the first. It slips in and out, just as demonstrated. Blood, one second; gone the next. My body is pulsing with euphoric waves. I jump in the shower and lose myself. I don’t know how much time passes: maybe an hour; probably more like two minutes. Either way, it feels amazing. I am God.
11th March, 2012 (Eleven Days without Mushrooms)
I wake up at four o’clock in the afternoon with an empty head. Like someone’s taken a drill to me KGB style. My lobotomy, it’s left me with half of my original intelligence. I dress like a respectable citizen, whatever that means, and go to work. Have to turn the taxi around because I forget to wear long sleeves to cover fresh tracks. When I get to work the people around me, my co-workers, are oblivious. They’re trying to impress each other by detailing the volume of alcohol they’ve consumed over the weekend. I am the conservative one, the boring one; I remain silent.
There is no competition between them and me. I win, by default, every time. They are the sort of people who act like junkies without ever touching a needle; the sort of people who pretend to be something they are not. Their tattoos and their piercings are fake indicators; shrapnel and battle scars, shop-bought, fashioned in sterile environments; commercial war-paint.
These emo kids with their piercings and their tattoos; advertising shit that they aren’t a part of: I have to laugh. Like Chopper with his books and his interviews; people who declare I am the real deal. They aren’t. The fact that they are intent on advertising is proof enough for me.
12th March, 2012 (Twelve Days without Mushrooms)
My foot starting hurting after about two hours in the city. Walking this way and that. I think I sprained an ankle. The pain, now twenty four hours later, is still there. It’s rising, without the drugs. I can hardly walk. After work, I limp across campus, into the university pub. Order a shot of whiskey with a beer chaser; I drink them at the bar. I half-stumble, half-limp, back to the cashier; there’s a long line, so I go back to the pub while I’m waiting and order another whiskey and beer combo. I scam a cigarette of some androgynous looking mother fucker. He, or she, looks at me like I’m a fucking junky. I tell him, or her, that I’m sorry for being such a scourge on society and light the fucking cigarette. Sit down at a table alone; I drink slowly, killing time before returning to the cashier. I read over a short story I wrote last year. It’s fucking shit, garbage; I can do a thousand times better now that I know what I know.
Back at the cashier, there’s a shit-stirring Indian guy arguing over the counter about how much of an inconvenience reality is. It’s one of those pointless conversations people have with themselves solely for the purposes of illustration; he’s arguing so people can see how upset he is. I want to get up and intervene; I want to save this poor woman from his condemnation. But, I don’t. I sit there and think about being a hero. I fantasize about being a good guy. That’s enough for me.
On the way home, I go into the bottle-o to get some beer. I come out with a six-pack of cheap Mexican lager, a bottle of discount scotch, and a couple of other odds and ends. It’s a public holiday, so the bus is going to take at least half an hour. I limp down the street, my foot becoming worse with every step; stopping every fifty metres to take a swig of scotch. It occurs to me at some point that I drink so hard to prove to people that appearances are not always what they seem; the whole “I may look like a fucking accountant, but – I assure you – I’m a nut bag” dilemma.
I’m tired of being the go-to guy, society’s most approachable citizen, so I compensate by acting like a cunt. I piss into somebody’s letterbox, remembering that I have an unpaid fine for public urination. This is a good way to end up back in court; I know that, but I don’t give a fuck. The amount of alcohol I have to drink to forget about the pain in my leg, it makes me retarded; the pain in my leg, it’s a good excuse to kill brain cells.
When I get home, I get naked immediately. I stand out on the back porch in my birthday suit drinking scotch, yelling at the neighbours. Fucking cunts, silently judging me all the time, giving me those wish-you-lived-somewhere-else looks; I threaten to kill their children, cut off their heads and shit down their throats.
13th March, 2012 (Thirteen Days without Mushrooms)
I wake up at midnight. It’s one of those awakenings like coming back to life; like I’ve been dragged out of a swimming pool and coughed up a lungful of chlorinated water. My short term memories come flooding back. Standing naked on the porch; lingering around Richmond looking for smack: I remember, but I don’t want to. I want to forget. I reset my palette with scotch; use Johnny Walker as mouthwash, then crack open a beer. It’s time to have a serious drink, to drink like alcoholics do. But, I don’t have the supplies. To get the most out of alcohol you need to stock up on consumables; a serious drink requires a healthy body. I have more than half a bottle of scotch to get through; I need to eat, a lot, or I’ll pass out prematurely. So, I go on a mission.
It’s two o’clock in the morning. I am stumbling down the side of a major suburban road holding a bottle of beer in one hand a joint in the other. A police car drives past at two hundred kilometres an hour. I see it before it sees me. I put the bottle on the ground as a reflex. Flick the joint into a bush. The cops have better things to do than pick on me tonight. Once they’re out of sight, I walk back and pick up the beer. I drink it quick and throw the bottle over a fence. Just in case. I remember the empty cop car in Richmond; once again, it occurs to me that I’m no different from the junky that helped me score. I’m paranoid; the invisible police are after me again.
I buy mixers; two cans of Mother, one bottle of Coke. On top of that I buy some snack food and a pornographic magazine. It’s difficult to find one that isn’t full of silicone laden sluts with Botox injections and re-constructed cunts. There aren’t any amateur mags, just fucking hustler and playboy and shit like that; blonde women and brunettes-dyed-blonde who take off their clothes for a living. The sort of pussy that gets wet on queue. Facial expressions like strippers on weekdays. Behind the fake smiles and pursed lips, you can see the boredom. You know, these porn chicks, they don’t respect the average guy who jerks off to them. No. We’re nothing to these ego freaks, less than nothing, we’re fucking pathetic. That’s why I don’t go for that sort of porn. It’s also why guys like virgins. An old girlfriend of mine could never understand what the appeal was in the inexperienced.
The inexperience is the appeal. Amateur girls are infinitely hotter than porn stars. Their nervousness is hot; they haven’t become jaded to being photographed, or bored with sex. Their pussy is wet because they are horny. They’re normal women, with normal lives, taking off their clothes and exposing their pink bits for a magazine spread. I honestly don’t understand how people prefer the bored porn-star alternative. I would rather watch a fifty year old woman strip down nervously in front of a camera than watch a porn start blow her fifty thousandth dick. Virgins appeal to men for the same reason: that innocent attitude towards sex that they have, untainted by a perpetual lack of satisfaction; the ratio of fantasy to reality is high.
I don’t like women who wear make-up. Advocating vanity in a particular gender is sexist. Women who wear make-up are no different than men who wear a lot of make-up. That’s really what equality means. We’re not there yet, as a species. Equality isn’t achieved upon declaration; there is a very long transition period from something to nothing. Same goes for racial equality; it’s still happening, we’re not there yet. Breaking down the gender divide, deconstructing sex, means things like cosmetics and lingerie need to go. They either need to go, or they need to be equal across the board; if it is accepted that women wear make-up, it should also be accepted that men wear make-up. Enlightenment is nothingness because everything is wrong. Adam and Eve should never have eaten the fruit and consequently clothed themselves. Clothes are wrong. Gender is wrong.
These things, they need to exist, so they can be disproved. The truth is not inherent; it is achieved via trial and error. We are created unaware of right and wrong. Upon creation we do not understand right. It is only through experiencing wrong, and opposing it, that we start heading in the correct direction. Conflict is at the core of literature. It is also at the core of spiritual evolution. When people say that God works in mysterious ways, what they mean is: everything happens for a reason. The holocaust is part of our journey. Every time somebody is raped or murdered. Every time somebody commits suicide. Every time a junky overdoses. It all contributes to the big picture. Our species observes history, past and present, and learns from it.
After experiencing the horrors of war, we are less inclined to declare it. The accounts of rape victims make us less inclined to rape people. And so on, and so forth. These people we condemn, they are the ones propelling the human race into the future. To do nothing, is to stagnate; to repress, is to delay. People shouldn’t fear sin or feel guilty for sinning. It’s all part of the process.
If you attempt to deconstruct everything, it never ends until there is nothing left. I’ve hit a couple of snags on my way to nothingness. One of them is sex. Like everything else, if you deconstruct sex, you end up with nothing. All of our taboos, all of our preconceptions about what is normal and what isn’t; they cease to exist. Perversion lies between aberration and enlightenment. To understand right and wrong you need to experience degrees of both; similarly, in order to understand sexuality you need to experience it from every angle imaginable.
Sex is an abstract territory. It needs to be explored, just as physical territories need to be explored. It is in our nature to explore the physical world and neglect the psychological; we repress the introverts and acclaim the extroverts. People feel like they need to do something to have value. They are embarrassed by their empty lives. They label others as perverted because they are afraid to pervert. Sexuality should be explored completely. Everything must be taken to the extreme in order for the boomerang effect of spiritual degradation and consequent enlightenment to occur. But, it’s difficult to go all the way; it’s difficult to detach from the norm.
I’ve sucked dick and I’ve eaten pussy. I find both, excluding hormones, to be equally enjoyable. What I mean by that is: the scent of a wet pussy gets me hard. There is a chemical aspect to heterosexual acts. Not to homosexual. There might be a psychological link between the smell of semen and the act of sex, but it isn’t hormonal. If you deconstruct hormones, and look at sex purely as an act of gratification, it is easy to justify bisexuality. Say you have two guys, or two girls, and they’re trapped on a desert island. It makes more sense for them to fuck then for them to not fuck. Whether they are “gay” is not a relevant question. What’s important is the orgasm. It is no co-incidence that homosexuality tends to occur more frequently in single-gender scenarios. The fact that straight guys who go to jail engage in homosexual acts proves that homosexual acts are not limited to homosexuals. And, therefore, sexuality does not exist. Those who are predisposed, for whatever reason, to same-sex relationships are no different than those who are predisposed to seeking out the opposite gender. We give them different labels, but – really – each one is just repressing the other side. It doesn’t end there. It goes beyond bisexuality.
Say there’s only one person on that desert island, a woman. She’s there all alone. No hope of being rescued. Then, an alien spaceship crashes onto the beach. A male humanoid alien climbs out. They become friends. They are both sexually frustrated. Two sentient beings marooned on a tiny desert island. They, too, should fuck. But, it doesn’t end there either.
Here’s another scenario. A woman, living on a remote ranch, is brushing her horse. The horse gets an erection. Should she neglect that horse cock? Fuck no. She should jerk that horse off. There was a study done on people who grew up on farms. An alarming percentage of them admitted to having sex with animals. On top of that there are those who are too ashamed to admit it. I’d think the latter category would be larger than the former. The point being, that – given the opportunity – humans will fool around. To understand what human means, we need to remove these restrictions that we place upon ourselves and just see what happens. Put two women together on a desert island; put a woman and an alien together on a desert island; put a woman and a horse together on a desert island: the result is always the same. Human means nothing.
So, anyway, I’m in the convenience store and the only magazine that isn’t full of porn stars is a chubby mag. Hustler doesn’t say skinny bitches with fake tits, yet “big and beautiful” is written on the cover: it’s a fetish mag, because the girls aren’t fucking anorexic. It comes in a two-pack with a typical porno – called Platinum Girls. I grab some other supplies: a couple of bottles of sports drinks and twenty dollars of McDonald’s from down the street.
When I get home, I pour myself a Mother and Johnny. I open Platinum first and feel next to nothing downstairs. It should be called Plastic; the women are all lip gloss and Botox; their tits are perfectly spherical; their skin is tanned and oiled; their eyes are dead. There is no humility; every one of them thinks they are fucking Goddesses; their egos are bigger than their tits.
I crack open a beer and flick through the chubby mag. A middle-aged woman is stripping. She has a sweet face; no make-up, glasses, imperfect complexion. The first shot is of her big natural tits, bulging through her dress, followed by a bra shot: an ordinary looking non-lacy undergarment supporting her huge saggy tits. There is something oedipal about tits. People frown at Freud. They say he’s a pervert. Really, he’s just unafraid to admit something all of us know. This obsession that man has with tits, it’s oedipal. Nipples; we grow up sucking on them for nutrition and end up sucking on them for sexual gratification. It’s not really a leap to link to, psychologically, link the two. I’m not saying that people want to literally fuck their own mothers. Neither was Freud.
Ignorant people who’ve never bothered to read Freud often insist that he said things he never said. He was an explorer. He famously used himself as a subject for psychological journeys. At the time, this was unheard of. But, given the disconnection from person to person, it is really the only thing that makes sense. Art is psychology; there is no difference between expression and expression. Fiction allows us to distance ourselves from the truth. It isn’t real, so we are more likely to be open-minded towards it. Homicide, rape, sexuality, depression: these things are easier to digest when they aren’t real. Freud is too real for most people. The depths he is willing to sink to within his own psyche are far beyond that of a “normal” person.
Tits are oedipal; there is a direct relationship between sexual and practical function. For most of history, women have fulfilled the role of wife and mother simultaneously. Boys grow up to be men, nurtured by their mothers, and seek out women to be mothers to both their children and – to a certain extent – themselves. Before the declaration of equality, and the beginning of the transition from a gender oriented society to a neutral one, wives and mothers had the same function as far as husbands and sons were concerned; excluding sex, of course.
In the early twentieth century, boys grew up with a maternal figure in their lives. Their mothers provided them with clean clothes and food, until they became men. Then, they left their childhood home and replaced the mother figure with a wife. The wife, in those days, fulfilled all of the same duties as their mother used to; excluding sex, of course.
So where does Oedipus fit in the animal kingdom. People use nature as a control group for humanity: nature is natural; humanity is an experiment gone wrong. If Oedipus doesn’t exist in nature, then it shouldn’t exist in man. But this is bullshit. Man is hyper-real. We are more natural than nature because we are conscious of terms like “natural” and “nature”. Oedipus exists in humanity because we understand ourselves so well. Freud was not a pervert; he was enlightened.
My cat believes that I am its mother. When cats “sharpen their claws” on your lap, what they are actually doing is kneading; kittens knead their mothers in order to promote lactation. It is an instinctive act. My cat, she does this to me, because I am a surrogate mother figure. In the animal kingdom breasts and lactation have nothing to do with sex, but maternity is clearly interchangeable. If you accept that a cat can substitute a human for a mother, then it is quite easy to wrap your head around the idea of a man substituting a wife for his mother.
Women often seek men who are like their fathers. This is no co-incidence; it’s substitution. Men like tits. Babies like tits. This is no co-incidence; it is, more or less, substitution. In terms of anthropology, it has been suggested that men are attracted to women with large breasts due to their ability to feed. That is, it is instinctive to pursue women with large breasts and child-bearing hips in order to insure the health of your prospective family. This doesn’t explain sucking on nipples as sexual act. The worship of tits has occurred for so long that we take it for granted that they are an erogenous zone. But there are countless sensitive places on the human body. We label people who like feet as “fetishists” and people who like breasts as “normal”. Really, they are the same. Using animals as the control group, neither breasts nor feet are sexual organs. Breasts are stranger than feet, in a sense, considering the maternal and reproductive implications. I like tits, I don’t care about the oedipal implications; the more complex we become the better as far as I’m concerned. Everything must be pursued, until the very end, before we turn around.
Her tits hang down to her belly button; big nipples, almost handfuls in themselves. She spreads her cunt; it’s wet. I want to fuck it until my cock bleeds. I’ve always had a fantasy for older women; fantasies, being things you want to do but decide that you can’t. Where, and how, do you find a woman to fuck that is twenty years older than you? I don’t know. But, I’d love to get real nasty with an older experienced woman. This wet pussy I’m looking at. No doubt, neglected; not given the attention it deserves. I want to worship it. Not on the page; in real life. I want to bury my face into a middle-aged cunt and eat my way out. It saddens me that this will probably never happen; that I am restricted to woman my own age; that I restrict myself. It saddens me that my fantasies are unfulfilled; that my fantasies are cruel.
Then again, if I can go out and pursue heroin on the streets surely I can go out and pursue some middle-aged pussy. The thing that worries me is where does it end? I feel like the more let myself go the more likely I am to let go completely; which is what I want. I fear what I want. We all do. We tell ourselves we want bullshit so that we can ignore what we really desire. We are perpetually unsatisfied; failure is ever-present in society. It’s easier to believe in laws than to believe in yourself; easier to believe in God. These things are finite, they are manageable; structural abstract nonsense providing – what we think are – much needed limitations to the infinitely variant.
I have been pursuing nothing, the infinite nothingness, for many years. Some people call deconstruction enlightenment. It is impossible to say what is at the end of the journey. The further you go, this doubt increases; the more you deconstruct preconceptions and human hurdles, the less you are inclined to continue. Until, eventually, you hit a big fucking snag. Holy people are not holy; they are only holy by contrast, to non-holy people. Absolute nothing has not been achieved. I’m not sure that it can be achieved. Though, maybe I’m just saying that to give myself an excuse to anchor. It seems to me that complete deconstruction, or “enlightenment” if you like, is like dividing zero by one. The first creature to evolve from this planet was not capable of enlightenment. So why should I be? There are always lessons to be learnt. There will always be goals beyond the goals that are visible. It is arrogant to assume, at this arbitrary moment in time, that I am able to achieve infinity. Those who approach the infinite will always approach the infinite; mathematics, with all its flawed human, logic tells us this. But maybe that’s the last step: linking finality with inconclusiveness.
Recently I came to believe in God. I know believe this, faith, to be a hurdle on the path to the actual God. The further you deconstruct, the more frightening it becomes. If you go on a spiritual journey towards nothing and – therefore – distance yourself from the rest of society, after a while religion starts looking pretty good. You find yourself in a void; in an absence of logic and reason; in an absence of everything and anything. The structure provided by religion, when you are lost, is immensely gratifying. But religion, really, is the opposite of religion; organized religion is a mirage one encounters on the way to actual religion. After deconstructing my entire life, and everybody’s lives, over the course of a decade, I became distraught. In a moment of weakness, I chose God. I chose to invent God; to give me an excuse to end my journey towards the infinite.
Man desires closure; man desires finality. We want things to make sense. We don’t want to die, unfinished. But we must. That is the nature of things. And it always will be the nature of things. A million years from now, there will be some other unimaginable form of life. Another million years and something else will live; unimaginable to the unimaginable. I am, in the grander scheme of things, both nothing and everything. I am; it is; we are: infinite.
I microwave some chicken nuggets and masturbate.
27th March, 2012 (Twenty-Seven Days without Mushrooms)
Wake up just before midnight with a cluster fuck of a headache, and start drinking beer. The hangover, I figure I can drink my way out of it. Typically I repress the urge to empty my stomach. Filling it with more alcohol tends to fix the problem. As for the headache, if I get drunk enough that should go away too. It’s a real cunt of a headache, so I have to drink quickly. Time is of the essence. If I’m going to cure this alcohol related illness with alcohol, there is only a small window of opportunity. I empty the first beer down my throat without pausing to breathe. My eyes are watering by the time I’m halfway through. But, it doesn’t make me feel better. It makes me feel worse. The headache is growing; this swollen dull pain where my third eye should be. Not vomiting requires all of my concentration. Every time I move, I can feel my insides becoming more and more volatile. I drink some water. That makes it worse. So, I start going through the fridge.
The only edible thing in the house is a half-eaten bowl of noodles in the bottom of the fridge. Just looking at it makes me sick, but I don’t really have a choice. If I want to keep drinking, I need to counteract the booze with some solids. I crack open another beer and start eating. It doesn’t taste like food. I am forcing myself to eat some foreign substance clearly not intended for human consumption. The beer offers some relief, despite being cheap; and warm, having failed to put it in the fridge the night before. My frontal lobe, or my sinuses; the hole where my third eye should be: it’s getting worse with every bite; worse with every mouthful of beer. Smothering this hangover is going to be too unpleasant to justify as worthwhile. I need to stop drinking, stop eating, and hurl.
The first round of regurgitation is easy. All I have to do is stop repressing it and it flows out like a burst water main. It comes out so fast that it rebounds off the sink and hits me in the face. I see it splatter against my glasses. I feel it dripping off my face. It feels amazing. Rejecting this poison I have been consuming for the past month. Taking it out, rather than putting it in. So, I keep forcing it, emptying my stomach into the sink; the rancid liquid splashing back onto the surrounding counter and mirror, dripping onto the floor. Then I hit that wall that you hit when you’re trying to turn yourself inside out. Hurling becomes painful. My mostly empty stomach is contracting, folding over on itself, spasm after spasm; this poor organ doing somersaults, trying desperately to tell me to stop.
But I can’t stop now. I need to get this filthy shit out, all of it, right away. This poison, I need to drain it with the same urgency one might drain a snake bite. I don’t want it anymore, any of it, not one fucking millimetre; if I get enough of it up the hangover will go away. I figure I can purge myself of the after-effects of alcohol by putting my digestive system in reverse. After about ten minutes I go to lie down, satisfied that my stomach is completely empty. But the sickness is still there. The headache still pounding against my scull, I return to the bathroom.
Chunks of beer marinated noodles are gathered on top of the drain; bits of onion and beef; black beans; and God-knows what else. I leave them sitting there and lean over the ceramic bowl, huffing the smell of vomit; using the contents of my stomach as bait for the contents of my stomach. I hyperventilate, taking short sharp breaths and squeezing my stomach with my abdominal muscles. It works: another fountain of half-digested food stuff flies out of my mouth into the sink. The pain is excruciating. I suspect that I’m vomiting from my intestines now, or my jejunum.
It is highly acidic. It burns my throat and tongue, my gums tingling with pain; forcing my stomach way beyond its capabilities. Maybe, I think, I can keep going until I end up vomiting shit; some kind of backwards enema. The idea makes me sick, literally. I start hurling faster, the pressure increasing rapidly until I am basically a human fire hose. I can hardly stand up, the pain is so bad. So, I drop onto the floor and crawl over to the toilet. An unflushed turd serves as bait for even more liquid. I have emptied maybe three litres out of my stomach by the time I finally stop.
Resting, exhausted, on the toilet, I realise the headache is gone; the sickness, too. My insane plan, it actually worked. I manage to get myself to bed. My mind is filled with crazed thoughts. It is a circus, my psyche. The experience of vomiting, something I hadn’t experienced for weeks despite being a full-blown alcoholic, it provides me a reason to stop drinking. The pain in my stomach, the disgusting spectacle of the fire-hose, I won’t forget it in the morning. Slowly, I drift off to sleep.
1st April, 2012 (Thirty-Two Days without Mushrooms) "Wombstone"
8th April, 2012 (Thirty-Nine Days without Mushrooms)
I wake up at ten o’clock at night, having passed out drunk sometime in the afternoon. I am suffering from severe sinusitis. There is a constant sharp pain just below my right temple. It feels like someone threw a brick at my head. Stumbling into the kitchen, I re-assemble the fragments of memory remaining from the day – unable to determine if the pain is a result of an injury. I grab a beer from the fridge. Carlton draught; cheap shit, it tastes even worse than usual. Like a mouthful of unprocessed yeast. The beer re-aligns me. I walk into the bathroom and carefully check my head for blood and bumps, running my fingers through my hair across my scalp, discovering nothing. On top of the sinusitis, I have a toothache. Since leaving my toothbrush in a taxi, I haven’t brushed in over a week; haven’t been to the dentist in at least five years. My hair is greasy and thin. My pants are torn to shreds. Alcohol is rapidly destroying me. When I was taking mushrooms, I was fine.
My favourite part of drinking is the hangover. I’ve tried to explain this to people before, but it’s difficult to articulate. Basically the reason I like hangovers is because the hangover is the introspective part of the alcohol experience. I am using alcohol to compensate for the lack of mushrooms, and what I like about mushrooms is the introspection and self-awareness. When you’re drunk, you don’t give a fuck about anything. When you wake up, dehydrated, with a throbbing headache, and find yourself living in a swamp – you get depressed. I can’t help but think I’m a total fuck up. There’s no getting around it. And I like thinking I’m a total fuck up, because I am. Being aware of the problem is the first step towards solving it. So, I figure, as long as I’m aware that’s something. That’s what appeals to me about tripping.
Mushrooms are not about doing, they are about thinking. People who dwell in the psychedelic realm generally aren’t particularly productive, they just think about being productive. Mushrooms put things in perspective. They give you hope, make you realize what you need to do. And hope is better than despair. I’d rather live in a state of perpetual hope than a state of perpetual self-destruction. I’ve always criticized ecstasy for providing me with false happiness, but all drugs create mirages. Cocaine inflates the ego; deludes people into thinking they are amazing and mushrooms provide false hope. When I trip, I am positive about the future. But nothing ever changes, significantly. Because I keep tripping; keep hoping; and never do.
There are fifteen empty beers on the desk in front of me as I type this. I’d say there’s probably something like fifty empties in the house. All from the past couple of days. And that’s not including the ones I consumed elsewhere. I got into the habit of drinking at University. Even if I’m already late for a class, I’ll stop in at the pub and chug down a pint or two. The lecturers don’t seem to care, because I’m functional. Blind drunk, I am a better student than most. I get distinctions for everything, top of the class; I don’t even need to try. It occurs to me, frequently, that I might be capable of something incredible if I cut back on the drink and the drugs. I’ve experienced a bit of sobriety over these past fungi-free weeks. After a couple of days straight I become a genius again. It’s been so long since I’ve been sober, that I was worried I’d fucked up my intelligence permanently. Somehow, everything I’ve consumed over the past thirteen years has had no effect. I am invincible.
I grab another beer and sit down to watch The Ides of March. A warning comes on, telling me I’m burning the future of the Australian film industry, despite the fact that I rented the DVD from a video store. This warning, it’s intended for someone else. I should see a warning that tells me I am not invincible; a warning that says one day I will regret squandering my talents. After the movie finishes I grab another beer and write a short review. This is a hangover habit. Watching films and writing reviews. Probably because I usually wake up around midnight with nothing better to do.
The sinus pain is gradually diminishing the more I drink, along with the introspection. I put on another film, Born into Brothels. It is about a bunch of children who live in a brothel. They have nothing. The girls are destined to become prostitutes, the boys have fewer options. There is a scene with this guy, one of the fathers, is sitting on the side of the road smoking hash. I think to myself, he has an excuse. Siting there, getting fucked up all day. This guy, he has nothing. He’s not squandering his talents. He doesn’t have any talents. He has no education. No prospects.
I have every opportunity in the world.
I pause it on his face, and wade through my swamp to the fridge. I am running out of beer. Fuck. There are only two cans of Carlton, and an oversized Dutch import. It pisses me off that I’m running out of alcohol. At the same time, I’m happy. It is one o’clock in the morning. The shops won’t be open for eight hours. I run my tongue alongside the toothache; I can taste blood.
I’ve been counting down the days until I can have some mushrooms. Four days from now. Wednesday night. It has been unbearable, resisting. I haven’t tripped for almost five and a half weeks now. It’s been a couple of days since I’ve had any weed; I am no longer addicted to marijuana. When I trip on Wednesday, it’s going to be a total mind-fuck. I never would have believed how dependent I was on mushrooms until I tried to stop taking them for a prolonged period of time.
I’ve gone through withdrawals repeatedly from countless substances; quit amphetamines, opiates, cigarettes, alcohol and weed. I always thought that mushrooms weren’t addictive. That I took them because I wanted to take them; and, that they were good for me. Strangely, they have been the most difficult thing to kick. Without the false hope that psychedelics provide I am no longer content to dwell in the planning stage of life. I need to do or, failing that, knock myself out. I have become dependent on escapism; whether I escape by deluding myself or through sedation is largely irrelevant. The addiction revolves around non-reality. False hope; inflated ego; false happiness; oblivion; sexual obsession – all of these things are non-reality.
Drugs are mind-altering. They take you from the actual to the imaginary, in one way or the other. That is the appeal. People get addicted to drugs because they don’t like their lives. Chemical addiction is nothing. Heroin addicts don’t relapse because they suddenly become chemically inclined to do so. The desire is always there, as long as they remain opposed to reality.
If I want to take drugs recreationally, rather than being an addict, I need to stop taking drugs and fix my life. Remove the cause of addiction, rather than attempting to resist temptation forever. On Wednesday, when I trip, I need to think about these things. Mushrooms will break the alcohol- cycle, because they are far more introspective than hangovers. I want to stop drinking now, but the desire isn’t strong enough for it to happen. When I trip, I will think back about all the pain alcohol has caused me over the past six weeks. It’s happened before. It will happen again.
This cycle needs to break. I have to stop drinking permanently. I’ve found the best way to quit everything is to take non-recreational doses of mushrooms, like anti-depressants, then ween myself off them. That might sound insane, but it’s worked for me in the past. I think part of it is placebo. The fact that I am consuming a drug, even though it hardly has any noticeable effects, is better – for my non-reality addiction – than consuming nothing.
I grab another beer from the fridge, the last Carlton, and watch another film. Mao’s Last Dancer. Starting to feel a little drunk now, can still feel the pain in my head though. I need some medication. Some pain killers or something. I’ve been resisting the temptation to vaporize some weed, because I don’t want to be stoned anymore. But I will, when I run out of beer, if the pain is still there. I should probably go to the doctor and get some sinus medication. But that’s always next to impossible due to the whole speed-manufacturing issue. The doctors take one look at me and conclude that I’m an addict: which I am; an addict with severe sinusitis.
Part of this has been posted before. It was incomplete at the time, and I was told it’d be better off as a journal entry. Now that I have finished writing it, more or less, I think it functions as a trip report; or, a series of trip reports that function as a whole. The quality and style of the writing varies according to mood and drug. It is a long report, over forty-nine thousand words and counting. Some details are less interesting than others. They have been included for the purpose of context; and, because editing would be a lie. Some sections are written under the influence of drugs, but most of it is the product of alcohol. After a particularly intense trip, documented here: http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/threads/612871-(P-Subs-dried-6.6-g-DXM-HBi-600-mg)-Veteran-Leap-Year, I decided to take a break from drugs…
Tequila Mockingbird
The Rock-Bottom Mirage
10th March, 2012 (Ten Days without Mushrooms)
I was supposed to quit all psychedelics for six weeks. Weed was a pipe dream, though. Complete abstinence from psychedelics wasn’t likely; I knew that from the beginning. So far, I haven't gone one day without smoke. This failure: I justified it by forcing myself to refrain from tripping; my inability to quit smoking weed would go hand in hand with my ability to resist the mushroom. In the end, I would be consuming less, which is better than a kick in the dick with a steel-capped boot. Failing completely was too depressing a notion to even consider. Another failure, another stain on my conscience: the dirty rag that absorbs all of my spilled, and forgotten, dreams; my endlessly faithful inner voice. The little version of me with wings and a halo: it never gives up; no matter how much neglect I inflict upon myself. It says, without a quiver of doubt, that I will succeed one day; all evidence to the contrary. It tells me all is not lost, when nothing good can be found. My conscience, it enables me; it is the thin film between my descent and the rocks at the bottom.
I never made any effort to deal with the withdrawals I experienced from my epic mushroom binge; instead, I distracted myself with non-psychedelics. Alcohol – being the only thing readily available to me – replaced the hallucinogenic mushrooms; my vow to never drink again, defeated by my decision to stop tripping: sixty-five alcohol-free days, down the drain. But the sauce didn’t satisfy me like it used to. I found myself, after little over two month’s absence, genuinely not wanting to return to drunkenness; the bar for recreational-drugs having been raised significantly by a psychedelic binge from hell. Compensation, if it were to exist, had to come from something else; something stronger; something capable of smothering my anxiety.
The choice was obvious; the next drug on my to-do list: heroin. But I didn’t seek it out; I continued to drink, emptying bottle after bottle of beer. To score would require hitting the streets and picking up off someone I didn’t know. The idea tortured me. It lingered in my brain, calling me a coward; laughing. The little version of me with horns and a tail, reminding me that my true desires had once again been outnumbered by my fears; reminding me that I am a failure.
Days went by without mushrooms, but I continued to hallucinate. Without alcohol, my anxieties resurfaced – so I tried to stay drunk as much as possible; my desire to get some gear rising with every sip. Until, finally, I reached my breaking point.
Wandering back and forth on the platform, fuelled by frustrations; my mind an endless mess of overlapping and contradicting thoughts: I had no idea what I was doing. Whether I should appear anxious, like I’m already addicted, or calm so as not to create any suspicion; whether I should talk to people or just tried to establish eye contact; what terminology I should use; how much it was going to cost: these questions had no answers. And, consequently, I had no approach.
At one point I was sitting on a train, eavesdropping on two smacked out goons talking about how fucked up they were; just as I was about to say something to them, they started boasting loudly about their exploits robbing and assaulting people. This was the closest I came to approaching someone, before returning home a failure. I couldn’t bring myself to buy a six pack of beer on the way back; alcohol, the consolation prize, was a fucking insult.
Back home, the jar of mushrooms kept popping into my head; I couldn’t shake it: tripping was inevitable without a suitable replacement. I had a choice. To return to the land of psychedelics and, by doing so, give up on the idea of a sober day; or go back out there and find some fucking smack: in my mind, heroin being the only thing to save me from my addictions. The opiate world is unfamiliar territory; heroin is, yet, untainted by my recklessness. I have abused everything else beyond repair; ruined entire classes of drugs. Opiates remain pure, untarnished, and, therefore, guilt-free. The decision to move on to heroin is a good one. I don’t have a smack problem yet; so, using is not yet an issue. Under the guise of convincing myself I can use drugs responsibly, I have a whole new class of drugs to explore and ruin. I smoke three joints and get on a train to the city.
Richmond station is crowded with football folk; true blue Australians dressed head to toe with merchandise. Colour-coded beanies, jerseys and flags; their faces painted to match. These sports enthusiasts, they make my mission impossible. So, I start walking.
I mean to head towards the city, but I’m too stoned to think properly. I walk for twenty minutes in the wrong direction, half-aware that I’m off-track. Upon realizing my mistake, I turn around to see the silhouette of Melbourne’s skyscrapers. The city, it is huge; I have been walking aimlessly away from these enormous structures, practically oblivious. I laugh at myself.
On the way back towards the station, I duck into a bottle-o and buy a beer. It’s a good costume for someone who definitely isn’t a narc; cops don’t walk around drinking beer in the middle of the afternoon, regardless of their position regarding cover. Continuing to drink throughout the mission was all part of the strategy. Getting pissed, while stoned, in the middle of a hunt for heroin; it is the only way to resist temptation. I am quitting mushrooms; I am doing a good thing.
I walk down the street, listening to the Velvet Underground, drinking beer, and scanning faces for likely drug-dealers. I ask a couple of harmless-looking people. I know they won’t be able to help me; I ask them, so I can go home telling myself that I tried: predictably, they brush me off. Some of them are disgusted by the very notion; a junky, actually talking to them, asking them for gear. I guess the implication is that if I ask them, they too look like junkies. And nobody wants that.
I throw my empty beer into an alleyway. A homeless man asks me for change. I offer him two dollars for a tip on where to score some smack. He tells me to go down to Victoria Street. He says to get on the Church Street tram and follow it to the end of the line; I walk, instead, drinking beer after beer as I go. The alcohol combines nicely with the weed.
Wandering through darkening streets full of drunken maniacs, I feel good; my mind is protected by a sedative cloud. By the time I reach my destination, I feel like actually going through with it. Fuck the consequences. But it’s not as easy as all that.
The homeless man led me to a fortress; a series of high-rise buildings, government commissioned flats. This place, this retirement home for the perpetually downtrodden, it requires a key-card to get through the doors. I watch a junky scan himself through a series of entry-points to reach the elevator; concluding that there is no way to get in. I keep walking, down Victoria Street. Everybody that walks past me has this look about them, like they just got out of prison.
I keep my mouth shut. Asking them would be suicide. That’s what my mind told me anyway. These people, they aren’t even human beings; they’re animals waiting for feeding time. They want me to give them an excuse. Just because they’re Maori or Vietnamese, doesn’t make them a fucking drug dealer. And, I should know that. Fucking racist little spoilt white cunt that I am. That’s what they say, in my dramatization, before they stab me to death with a biro and piss on my corpse. If I’m going to ask someone, seriously, it needs to be a white guy. And, he needs to be smaller than me.
I walk into a pub and grab another beer, drinking as I continue on my journey. By this point my left foot is starting to hurt from over-exertion. I have been walking for hours, non-stop, with nothing to eat or drink but beer. I am exhausted and dehydrated; the roof of my mouth sticks to my tongue and my tongue sticks to my teeth. Just as I’m about to give up, I see a skinny junky-looking guy stumbling through traffic towards me. His girlfriend is holding a long-neck. They are both fucked off their brains on amphetamines. I stop them and ask if they can help me get some smack.
Their faces light up. They say, “We’re glad to help; you asked the right person.” The guy took the reins from then on. He told me everything about himself. He boasted being a member of a bike gang; boasted that he beats the shit out of people on a regular basis. I took it with a grain of salt. The guy, he’s smaller than me. And I’m fucking small.
We walk around Richmond looking for smack. He tells me that he can get me some gear but it’d be much easier to get some speed. I tell him I don’t want speed, but – honestly – at this point, I’ll take what I can get. I want to fucking get off. I want some serious chemicals. He says, “Heroin dealers; they’re kind of weird.” I tell him, I know; paranoid fuckers, smack dealers. Especially when they’re dealing with somebody like me: halfway between junky and narc. I’m hard to place. I don’t fit the usual junky bill. On the other hand, I don’t look like a narc either. Narcs are fucking incompetent. They’ve got no idea how to integrate themselves into the scene.
We travel about, him telling me stories, me acting aloof. He tries to scare me, not because he’s a scary cunt but because he’s not. He makes up for his apparent accessibility by acting up the psychotic angle. He tells me about Chopper Reed, like that’s supposed to startle me or something. Everybody in Melbourne has a story about Chopper Reed. Most of them are as believable as Chopper’s stories. If anything, the mention of the phony cunt gets me thinking that this guy’s not so bad; that he’s just a lackey. Chopper is the kind of criminal-icon, that people who aren’t criminals associate with criminality. He’s an entry level nut-job. I know this. I’ve heard hundreds of Chopper stories that are supposed to startle me; they don’t.
The story keeps changing. He says we’re going to get so much speed or so much smack, then he contradicts himself. He’s fucked off his head. He doesn’t know what he’s saying, but he knows that he wants to impress me. His girlfriend, or whatever the fuck she is, she keeps to herself; she gives me these smug looks like I’m out of my element. Like, I don’t know what’s going on. In reality I’m on top of shit, and they aren’t.
The mission goes on, and on, and on. We run into this guy on Victoria street who looks like he has some sort of serious medical condition. His right shoulder is much higher than his left; his eyes keep darting about in his head like ping pong balls. He tells us, he can get us some speed. I tell my new friend: I don’t want any fucking speed. I want some smack. Regardless we go on a little detour with this disabled looking mother fucker: wandering through tiny streets; interacting with junkies. Eventually my new friend says, “Fuck this.” He tells me that we’re on a goose chase. That this cunt, the one that looks like he has a mild case of cerebral palsy, is going to fuck us.
We say goodbye to that mission and return to the original one. Meanwhile, I start to become anxious. Despite the beer and the weed, I am getting a little concerned. This is not my territory. I am a human on an alien planet. These people, they are unrecognizable to me. They are all freaks.
My new friend, he tells me we’re almost there. He’s always saying that, though. We’re almost there. We’re almost there. Like a fucking broken record. He recognizes my apprehension and is amused by it. They both are: husband and wife; Mr and Mrs Junky. I don’t give up. I don’t call it quits. This mission, I have decided, will end one way or another.
At one point I hear this smacking sound. Flesh against flesh. I turn back to see Mrs Junky pounding a fist into the palm of her hand. It’s supposed to frighten me; it does. But I keep going. There’s no turning back now. I didn’t do all of this for nothing. Mr Junky, he tells me we have to go down some alleyway to get to where we’re going. I tell him I’d rather take the long way. He says okay like a man pats a dog; he says okay but I know, he doesn’t mean it.
After some time, we get to the alleyway. It’s not as bad as I fantasized. It’s well-lit; a short passage through the fortress. This halfway house that my new friend lives in, we meander through it; past police, which he denies exist. The police are clearly the major source of his paranoia. In between denials of the blue and white checkers, he gets seriously concerned. Mrs Junky has long since departed. When she left, I figured she didn’t want to witness the crime; that she didn’t want to see her boyfriend, or whatever the fuck, beat the shit out of some poor cunt. But the thing is I’m ready to beat the shit out of him. I’m ready to take a punch in the face and send one back, his way. Prior to arriving in the alleyway, I take off my glasses and put them in my pocket so they don’t break against his knuckles. But, to my surprise, there is no fist fight.
This guy I met on the street, he leads me into a dim-lit flat. He tells me before we get there that I should give him my cash. I say no. I say, fuck that, I’m not giving up my hard earned dollars to someone I just me. No offence and what not. He keeps trying to convince me to give him the cash. He says this guy, the speed dealer, is fucking paranoid as shit. I tell him I don’t give a fuck. I’m not handing over notes on the street to someone I just met. No offence and what not. He accepts this.
We get inside and the cunt is as paranoid as he described. He keeps eyeing me like I’m a fucking narc. The whole time, he’s looking at me waiting to pounce; waiting to pull a knife; waiting to make some signal to his dodgy friends sitting in the dark corners of his flat. These guys they don’t say anything, even when spoken to. They are like statues; ominous fucking statues. Still, I keep my cool. I don’t react. I just keep going for the junk, like junkies do.
The countertop is covered with some kind of slime. The dealer, he grabs a rag and wipes it down smearing the slime across the linoleum in streaks. Then, he plops down a pair of scales and weighs us up. My anxiety is decreasing. I realise, in this moment, that I’m not some fucking mark. My new friend, he hasn’t been lying. He hasn’t been setting me up to get fucked over. This: is just a deal.
We get our bags and go back to the fortress. My new friend, he lives up there; near the top floor. I walk with him past the endless series of security checks; up a slow moving elevator, to his front door. His apartment is hardly furnished. There is rubbish lying everywhere; dirty dishes towering over the sink: it reminds me of home.
He starts stressing about the whereabouts of a spoon, then he realizes it is at the bottom of the pile of unwashed dishes. Reaching his hand into the sink full of stagnant dish water he produces a rusty looking spoon. He tells me that I can whack up too. He doesn’t mind. I say, “No thanks, man. I’m alright.” I make up some excuse about having limited time, which he accepts because I have an honorary degree in lying; I should’ve been a lawyer.
Leading up to this moment, he’s been telling me that he’s a doctor. He’s so good at hitting veins that he’s some kind of God. I take it with the same grain of salt that I take everything he says. Until I see him do it. He rolls up his sleeve to reveal a big fucking hole in his arm. And I mean big, like Requiem for a Dream size. The needle slips in and out in three seconds. Blood flows into the chamber like he’s turning on a tap. And it’s done. But that’s not good enough for him. He’s been shooting speed for three days, without sleep. Mrs Junky confirmed this earlier.
There are no other tracks on his arm; just one big fucking hole, like an orifice. He squirts more water into the spoon and mops a bit of cotton around to get the last bits. Slams the pick into the same hole and shoots up again. He looks at me like I should give him some of my bag. I look at him like there’s no way in fucking hell that’s going to happen. He understands. Before I leave, he tries to sell me a baseball cap, clearly stolen, then a pair of shoes. I tell him, no thanks.
Back on the street, his mind is racing faster than minds should race. Even on speed. He’s fucking off the planet. He’s trying to operate a mobile phone but it is confusing the fuck out of him. He asks me to do it for him. I say no. He asks a passer-by. The guy takes one look at him and tells him that the cops have just pulled up; there is an empty police car on the side of the road. My new friend, he doesn’t see it as empty; his overworked brain imagines policemen sitting in the driver and passenger, waiting to tag us. He tells me to stash my bag, so – infused with his paranoia – I pull the two points of speed out of my pocket and shove it into my underwear. I can feel it, this little bit of plastic, under my dick. When we get to the next corner he says, “I’ve got to go this way,” and we depart. I reach out my hand to say thanks but he refuses, frightened that the invisible policemen might see us shake and conclude that it is some kind of deal.
It is the same bathroom I have injected in thousands of times. The same bathroom I collapsed a vein. I am drunk, again, so I have to be careful. I try a couple of veins under my elbow, resting the pick against the muscles in my forearm. It doesn’t work. They’ve shrunk, either that or I’m just pissed; probably both. After a couple of failed attempts I decide to mimic the doctor. This crazed speed freak junky that I met on Victoria Street; I recreate his shot. And it works perfectly.
My mind is clear. There is no anxiety. No withdrawals from other shit. I am a fucking skyscraper. I am God. I am everything. I start racing around the room like a fly confined by architecture. Then, quickly, I mix up the rest of the bag. The second shot is as perfect as the first. It slips in and out, just as demonstrated. Blood, one second; gone the next. My body is pulsing with euphoric waves. I jump in the shower and lose myself. I don’t know how much time passes: maybe an hour; probably more like two minutes. Either way, it feels amazing. I am God.
11th March, 2012 (Eleven Days without Mushrooms)
I wake up at four o’clock in the afternoon with an empty head. Like someone’s taken a drill to me KGB style. My lobotomy, it’s left me with half of my original intelligence. I dress like a respectable citizen, whatever that means, and go to work. Have to turn the taxi around because I forget to wear long sleeves to cover fresh tracks. When I get to work the people around me, my co-workers, are oblivious. They’re trying to impress each other by detailing the volume of alcohol they’ve consumed over the weekend. I am the conservative one, the boring one; I remain silent.
There is no competition between them and me. I win, by default, every time. They are the sort of people who act like junkies without ever touching a needle; the sort of people who pretend to be something they are not. Their tattoos and their piercings are fake indicators; shrapnel and battle scars, shop-bought, fashioned in sterile environments; commercial war-paint.
These emo kids with their piercings and their tattoos; advertising shit that they aren’t a part of: I have to laugh. Like Chopper with his books and his interviews; people who declare I am the real deal. They aren’t. The fact that they are intent on advertising is proof enough for me.
12th March, 2012 (Twelve Days without Mushrooms)
My foot starting hurting after about two hours in the city. Walking this way and that. I think I sprained an ankle. The pain, now twenty four hours later, is still there. It’s rising, without the drugs. I can hardly walk. After work, I limp across campus, into the university pub. Order a shot of whiskey with a beer chaser; I drink them at the bar. I half-stumble, half-limp, back to the cashier; there’s a long line, so I go back to the pub while I’m waiting and order another whiskey and beer combo. I scam a cigarette of some androgynous looking mother fucker. He, or she, looks at me like I’m a fucking junky. I tell him, or her, that I’m sorry for being such a scourge on society and light the fucking cigarette. Sit down at a table alone; I drink slowly, killing time before returning to the cashier. I read over a short story I wrote last year. It’s fucking shit, garbage; I can do a thousand times better now that I know what I know.
Back at the cashier, there’s a shit-stirring Indian guy arguing over the counter about how much of an inconvenience reality is. It’s one of those pointless conversations people have with themselves solely for the purposes of illustration; he’s arguing so people can see how upset he is. I want to get up and intervene; I want to save this poor woman from his condemnation. But, I don’t. I sit there and think about being a hero. I fantasize about being a good guy. That’s enough for me.
On the way home, I go into the bottle-o to get some beer. I come out with a six-pack of cheap Mexican lager, a bottle of discount scotch, and a couple of other odds and ends. It’s a public holiday, so the bus is going to take at least half an hour. I limp down the street, my foot becoming worse with every step; stopping every fifty metres to take a swig of scotch. It occurs to me at some point that I drink so hard to prove to people that appearances are not always what they seem; the whole “I may look like a fucking accountant, but – I assure you – I’m a nut bag” dilemma.
I’m tired of being the go-to guy, society’s most approachable citizen, so I compensate by acting like a cunt. I piss into somebody’s letterbox, remembering that I have an unpaid fine for public urination. This is a good way to end up back in court; I know that, but I don’t give a fuck. The amount of alcohol I have to drink to forget about the pain in my leg, it makes me retarded; the pain in my leg, it’s a good excuse to kill brain cells.
When I get home, I get naked immediately. I stand out on the back porch in my birthday suit drinking scotch, yelling at the neighbours. Fucking cunts, silently judging me all the time, giving me those wish-you-lived-somewhere-else looks; I threaten to kill their children, cut off their heads and shit down their throats.
13th March, 2012 (Thirteen Days without Mushrooms)
I wake up at midnight. It’s one of those awakenings like coming back to life; like I’ve been dragged out of a swimming pool and coughed up a lungful of chlorinated water. My short term memories come flooding back. Standing naked on the porch; lingering around Richmond looking for smack: I remember, but I don’t want to. I want to forget. I reset my palette with scotch; use Johnny Walker as mouthwash, then crack open a beer. It’s time to have a serious drink, to drink like alcoholics do. But, I don’t have the supplies. To get the most out of alcohol you need to stock up on consumables; a serious drink requires a healthy body. I have more than half a bottle of scotch to get through; I need to eat, a lot, or I’ll pass out prematurely. So, I go on a mission.
It’s two o’clock in the morning. I am stumbling down the side of a major suburban road holding a bottle of beer in one hand a joint in the other. A police car drives past at two hundred kilometres an hour. I see it before it sees me. I put the bottle on the ground as a reflex. Flick the joint into a bush. The cops have better things to do than pick on me tonight. Once they’re out of sight, I walk back and pick up the beer. I drink it quick and throw the bottle over a fence. Just in case. I remember the empty cop car in Richmond; once again, it occurs to me that I’m no different from the junky that helped me score. I’m paranoid; the invisible police are after me again.
I buy mixers; two cans of Mother, one bottle of Coke. On top of that I buy some snack food and a pornographic magazine. It’s difficult to find one that isn’t full of silicone laden sluts with Botox injections and re-constructed cunts. There aren’t any amateur mags, just fucking hustler and playboy and shit like that; blonde women and brunettes-dyed-blonde who take off their clothes for a living. The sort of pussy that gets wet on queue. Facial expressions like strippers on weekdays. Behind the fake smiles and pursed lips, you can see the boredom. You know, these porn chicks, they don’t respect the average guy who jerks off to them. No. We’re nothing to these ego freaks, less than nothing, we’re fucking pathetic. That’s why I don’t go for that sort of porn. It’s also why guys like virgins. An old girlfriend of mine could never understand what the appeal was in the inexperienced.
The inexperience is the appeal. Amateur girls are infinitely hotter than porn stars. Their nervousness is hot; they haven’t become jaded to being photographed, or bored with sex. Their pussy is wet because they are horny. They’re normal women, with normal lives, taking off their clothes and exposing their pink bits for a magazine spread. I honestly don’t understand how people prefer the bored porn-star alternative. I would rather watch a fifty year old woman strip down nervously in front of a camera than watch a porn start blow her fifty thousandth dick. Virgins appeal to men for the same reason: that innocent attitude towards sex that they have, untainted by a perpetual lack of satisfaction; the ratio of fantasy to reality is high.
I don’t like women who wear make-up. Advocating vanity in a particular gender is sexist. Women who wear make-up are no different than men who wear a lot of make-up. That’s really what equality means. We’re not there yet, as a species. Equality isn’t achieved upon declaration; there is a very long transition period from something to nothing. Same goes for racial equality; it’s still happening, we’re not there yet. Breaking down the gender divide, deconstructing sex, means things like cosmetics and lingerie need to go. They either need to go, or they need to be equal across the board; if it is accepted that women wear make-up, it should also be accepted that men wear make-up. Enlightenment is nothingness because everything is wrong. Adam and Eve should never have eaten the fruit and consequently clothed themselves. Clothes are wrong. Gender is wrong.
These things, they need to exist, so they can be disproved. The truth is not inherent; it is achieved via trial and error. We are created unaware of right and wrong. Upon creation we do not understand right. It is only through experiencing wrong, and opposing it, that we start heading in the correct direction. Conflict is at the core of literature. It is also at the core of spiritual evolution. When people say that God works in mysterious ways, what they mean is: everything happens for a reason. The holocaust is part of our journey. Every time somebody is raped or murdered. Every time somebody commits suicide. Every time a junky overdoses. It all contributes to the big picture. Our species observes history, past and present, and learns from it.
After experiencing the horrors of war, we are less inclined to declare it. The accounts of rape victims make us less inclined to rape people. And so on, and so forth. These people we condemn, they are the ones propelling the human race into the future. To do nothing, is to stagnate; to repress, is to delay. People shouldn’t fear sin or feel guilty for sinning. It’s all part of the process.
If you attempt to deconstruct everything, it never ends until there is nothing left. I’ve hit a couple of snags on my way to nothingness. One of them is sex. Like everything else, if you deconstruct sex, you end up with nothing. All of our taboos, all of our preconceptions about what is normal and what isn’t; they cease to exist. Perversion lies between aberration and enlightenment. To understand right and wrong you need to experience degrees of both; similarly, in order to understand sexuality you need to experience it from every angle imaginable.
Sex is an abstract territory. It needs to be explored, just as physical territories need to be explored. It is in our nature to explore the physical world and neglect the psychological; we repress the introverts and acclaim the extroverts. People feel like they need to do something to have value. They are embarrassed by their empty lives. They label others as perverted because they are afraid to pervert. Sexuality should be explored completely. Everything must be taken to the extreme in order for the boomerang effect of spiritual degradation and consequent enlightenment to occur. But, it’s difficult to go all the way; it’s difficult to detach from the norm.
I’ve sucked dick and I’ve eaten pussy. I find both, excluding hormones, to be equally enjoyable. What I mean by that is: the scent of a wet pussy gets me hard. There is a chemical aspect to heterosexual acts. Not to homosexual. There might be a psychological link between the smell of semen and the act of sex, but it isn’t hormonal. If you deconstruct hormones, and look at sex purely as an act of gratification, it is easy to justify bisexuality. Say you have two guys, or two girls, and they’re trapped on a desert island. It makes more sense for them to fuck then for them to not fuck. Whether they are “gay” is not a relevant question. What’s important is the orgasm. It is no co-incidence that homosexuality tends to occur more frequently in single-gender scenarios. The fact that straight guys who go to jail engage in homosexual acts proves that homosexual acts are not limited to homosexuals. And, therefore, sexuality does not exist. Those who are predisposed, for whatever reason, to same-sex relationships are no different than those who are predisposed to seeking out the opposite gender. We give them different labels, but – really – each one is just repressing the other side. It doesn’t end there. It goes beyond bisexuality.
Say there’s only one person on that desert island, a woman. She’s there all alone. No hope of being rescued. Then, an alien spaceship crashes onto the beach. A male humanoid alien climbs out. They become friends. They are both sexually frustrated. Two sentient beings marooned on a tiny desert island. They, too, should fuck. But, it doesn’t end there either.
Here’s another scenario. A woman, living on a remote ranch, is brushing her horse. The horse gets an erection. Should she neglect that horse cock? Fuck no. She should jerk that horse off. There was a study done on people who grew up on farms. An alarming percentage of them admitted to having sex with animals. On top of that there are those who are too ashamed to admit it. I’d think the latter category would be larger than the former. The point being, that – given the opportunity – humans will fool around. To understand what human means, we need to remove these restrictions that we place upon ourselves and just see what happens. Put two women together on a desert island; put a woman and an alien together on a desert island; put a woman and a horse together on a desert island: the result is always the same. Human means nothing.
So, anyway, I’m in the convenience store and the only magazine that isn’t full of porn stars is a chubby mag. Hustler doesn’t say skinny bitches with fake tits, yet “big and beautiful” is written on the cover: it’s a fetish mag, because the girls aren’t fucking anorexic. It comes in a two-pack with a typical porno – called Platinum Girls. I grab some other supplies: a couple of bottles of sports drinks and twenty dollars of McDonald’s from down the street.
When I get home, I pour myself a Mother and Johnny. I open Platinum first and feel next to nothing downstairs. It should be called Plastic; the women are all lip gloss and Botox; their tits are perfectly spherical; their skin is tanned and oiled; their eyes are dead. There is no humility; every one of them thinks they are fucking Goddesses; their egos are bigger than their tits.
I crack open a beer and flick through the chubby mag. A middle-aged woman is stripping. She has a sweet face; no make-up, glasses, imperfect complexion. The first shot is of her big natural tits, bulging through her dress, followed by a bra shot: an ordinary looking non-lacy undergarment supporting her huge saggy tits. There is something oedipal about tits. People frown at Freud. They say he’s a pervert. Really, he’s just unafraid to admit something all of us know. This obsession that man has with tits, it’s oedipal. Nipples; we grow up sucking on them for nutrition and end up sucking on them for sexual gratification. It’s not really a leap to link to, psychologically, link the two. I’m not saying that people want to literally fuck their own mothers. Neither was Freud.
Ignorant people who’ve never bothered to read Freud often insist that he said things he never said. He was an explorer. He famously used himself as a subject for psychological journeys. At the time, this was unheard of. But, given the disconnection from person to person, it is really the only thing that makes sense. Art is psychology; there is no difference between expression and expression. Fiction allows us to distance ourselves from the truth. It isn’t real, so we are more likely to be open-minded towards it. Homicide, rape, sexuality, depression: these things are easier to digest when they aren’t real. Freud is too real for most people. The depths he is willing to sink to within his own psyche are far beyond that of a “normal” person.
Tits are oedipal; there is a direct relationship between sexual and practical function. For most of history, women have fulfilled the role of wife and mother simultaneously. Boys grow up to be men, nurtured by their mothers, and seek out women to be mothers to both their children and – to a certain extent – themselves. Before the declaration of equality, and the beginning of the transition from a gender oriented society to a neutral one, wives and mothers had the same function as far as husbands and sons were concerned; excluding sex, of course.
In the early twentieth century, boys grew up with a maternal figure in their lives. Their mothers provided them with clean clothes and food, until they became men. Then, they left their childhood home and replaced the mother figure with a wife. The wife, in those days, fulfilled all of the same duties as their mother used to; excluding sex, of course.
So where does Oedipus fit in the animal kingdom. People use nature as a control group for humanity: nature is natural; humanity is an experiment gone wrong. If Oedipus doesn’t exist in nature, then it shouldn’t exist in man. But this is bullshit. Man is hyper-real. We are more natural than nature because we are conscious of terms like “natural” and “nature”. Oedipus exists in humanity because we understand ourselves so well. Freud was not a pervert; he was enlightened.
My cat believes that I am its mother. When cats “sharpen their claws” on your lap, what they are actually doing is kneading; kittens knead their mothers in order to promote lactation. It is an instinctive act. My cat, she does this to me, because I am a surrogate mother figure. In the animal kingdom breasts and lactation have nothing to do with sex, but maternity is clearly interchangeable. If you accept that a cat can substitute a human for a mother, then it is quite easy to wrap your head around the idea of a man substituting a wife for his mother.
Women often seek men who are like their fathers. This is no co-incidence; it’s substitution. Men like tits. Babies like tits. This is no co-incidence; it is, more or less, substitution. In terms of anthropology, it has been suggested that men are attracted to women with large breasts due to their ability to feed. That is, it is instinctive to pursue women with large breasts and child-bearing hips in order to insure the health of your prospective family. This doesn’t explain sucking on nipples as sexual act. The worship of tits has occurred for so long that we take it for granted that they are an erogenous zone. But there are countless sensitive places on the human body. We label people who like feet as “fetishists” and people who like breasts as “normal”. Really, they are the same. Using animals as the control group, neither breasts nor feet are sexual organs. Breasts are stranger than feet, in a sense, considering the maternal and reproductive implications. I like tits, I don’t care about the oedipal implications; the more complex we become the better as far as I’m concerned. Everything must be pursued, until the very end, before we turn around.
Her tits hang down to her belly button; big nipples, almost handfuls in themselves. She spreads her cunt; it’s wet. I want to fuck it until my cock bleeds. I’ve always had a fantasy for older women; fantasies, being things you want to do but decide that you can’t. Where, and how, do you find a woman to fuck that is twenty years older than you? I don’t know. But, I’d love to get real nasty with an older experienced woman. This wet pussy I’m looking at. No doubt, neglected; not given the attention it deserves. I want to worship it. Not on the page; in real life. I want to bury my face into a middle-aged cunt and eat my way out. It saddens me that this will probably never happen; that I am restricted to woman my own age; that I restrict myself. It saddens me that my fantasies are unfulfilled; that my fantasies are cruel.
Then again, if I can go out and pursue heroin on the streets surely I can go out and pursue some middle-aged pussy. The thing that worries me is where does it end? I feel like the more let myself go the more likely I am to let go completely; which is what I want. I fear what I want. We all do. We tell ourselves we want bullshit so that we can ignore what we really desire. We are perpetually unsatisfied; failure is ever-present in society. It’s easier to believe in laws than to believe in yourself; easier to believe in God. These things are finite, they are manageable; structural abstract nonsense providing – what we think are – much needed limitations to the infinitely variant.
I have been pursuing nothing, the infinite nothingness, for many years. Some people call deconstruction enlightenment. It is impossible to say what is at the end of the journey. The further you go, this doubt increases; the more you deconstruct preconceptions and human hurdles, the less you are inclined to continue. Until, eventually, you hit a big fucking snag. Holy people are not holy; they are only holy by contrast, to non-holy people. Absolute nothing has not been achieved. I’m not sure that it can be achieved. Though, maybe I’m just saying that to give myself an excuse to anchor. It seems to me that complete deconstruction, or “enlightenment” if you like, is like dividing zero by one. The first creature to evolve from this planet was not capable of enlightenment. So why should I be? There are always lessons to be learnt. There will always be goals beyond the goals that are visible. It is arrogant to assume, at this arbitrary moment in time, that I am able to achieve infinity. Those who approach the infinite will always approach the infinite; mathematics, with all its flawed human, logic tells us this. But maybe that’s the last step: linking finality with inconclusiveness.
Recently I came to believe in God. I know believe this, faith, to be a hurdle on the path to the actual God. The further you deconstruct, the more frightening it becomes. If you go on a spiritual journey towards nothing and – therefore – distance yourself from the rest of society, after a while religion starts looking pretty good. You find yourself in a void; in an absence of logic and reason; in an absence of everything and anything. The structure provided by religion, when you are lost, is immensely gratifying. But religion, really, is the opposite of religion; organized religion is a mirage one encounters on the way to actual religion. After deconstructing my entire life, and everybody’s lives, over the course of a decade, I became distraught. In a moment of weakness, I chose God. I chose to invent God; to give me an excuse to end my journey towards the infinite.
Man desires closure; man desires finality. We want things to make sense. We don’t want to die, unfinished. But we must. That is the nature of things. And it always will be the nature of things. A million years from now, there will be some other unimaginable form of life. Another million years and something else will live; unimaginable to the unimaginable. I am, in the grander scheme of things, both nothing and everything. I am; it is; we are: infinite.
I microwave some chicken nuggets and masturbate.
27th March, 2012 (Twenty-Seven Days without Mushrooms)
Wake up just before midnight with a cluster fuck of a headache, and start drinking beer. The hangover, I figure I can drink my way out of it. Typically I repress the urge to empty my stomach. Filling it with more alcohol tends to fix the problem. As for the headache, if I get drunk enough that should go away too. It’s a real cunt of a headache, so I have to drink quickly. Time is of the essence. If I’m going to cure this alcohol related illness with alcohol, there is only a small window of opportunity. I empty the first beer down my throat without pausing to breathe. My eyes are watering by the time I’m halfway through. But, it doesn’t make me feel better. It makes me feel worse. The headache is growing; this swollen dull pain where my third eye should be. Not vomiting requires all of my concentration. Every time I move, I can feel my insides becoming more and more volatile. I drink some water. That makes it worse. So, I start going through the fridge.
The only edible thing in the house is a half-eaten bowl of noodles in the bottom of the fridge. Just looking at it makes me sick, but I don’t really have a choice. If I want to keep drinking, I need to counteract the booze with some solids. I crack open another beer and start eating. It doesn’t taste like food. I am forcing myself to eat some foreign substance clearly not intended for human consumption. The beer offers some relief, despite being cheap; and warm, having failed to put it in the fridge the night before. My frontal lobe, or my sinuses; the hole where my third eye should be: it’s getting worse with every bite; worse with every mouthful of beer. Smothering this hangover is going to be too unpleasant to justify as worthwhile. I need to stop drinking, stop eating, and hurl.
The first round of regurgitation is easy. All I have to do is stop repressing it and it flows out like a burst water main. It comes out so fast that it rebounds off the sink and hits me in the face. I see it splatter against my glasses. I feel it dripping off my face. It feels amazing. Rejecting this poison I have been consuming for the past month. Taking it out, rather than putting it in. So, I keep forcing it, emptying my stomach into the sink; the rancid liquid splashing back onto the surrounding counter and mirror, dripping onto the floor. Then I hit that wall that you hit when you’re trying to turn yourself inside out. Hurling becomes painful. My mostly empty stomach is contracting, folding over on itself, spasm after spasm; this poor organ doing somersaults, trying desperately to tell me to stop.
But I can’t stop now. I need to get this filthy shit out, all of it, right away. This poison, I need to drain it with the same urgency one might drain a snake bite. I don’t want it anymore, any of it, not one fucking millimetre; if I get enough of it up the hangover will go away. I figure I can purge myself of the after-effects of alcohol by putting my digestive system in reverse. After about ten minutes I go to lie down, satisfied that my stomach is completely empty. But the sickness is still there. The headache still pounding against my scull, I return to the bathroom.
Chunks of beer marinated noodles are gathered on top of the drain; bits of onion and beef; black beans; and God-knows what else. I leave them sitting there and lean over the ceramic bowl, huffing the smell of vomit; using the contents of my stomach as bait for the contents of my stomach. I hyperventilate, taking short sharp breaths and squeezing my stomach with my abdominal muscles. It works: another fountain of half-digested food stuff flies out of my mouth into the sink. The pain is excruciating. I suspect that I’m vomiting from my intestines now, or my jejunum.
It is highly acidic. It burns my throat and tongue, my gums tingling with pain; forcing my stomach way beyond its capabilities. Maybe, I think, I can keep going until I end up vomiting shit; some kind of backwards enema. The idea makes me sick, literally. I start hurling faster, the pressure increasing rapidly until I am basically a human fire hose. I can hardly stand up, the pain is so bad. So, I drop onto the floor and crawl over to the toilet. An unflushed turd serves as bait for even more liquid. I have emptied maybe three litres out of my stomach by the time I finally stop.
Resting, exhausted, on the toilet, I realise the headache is gone; the sickness, too. My insane plan, it actually worked. I manage to get myself to bed. My mind is filled with crazed thoughts. It is a circus, my psyche. The experience of vomiting, something I hadn’t experienced for weeks despite being a full-blown alcoholic, it provides me a reason to stop drinking. The pain in my stomach, the disgusting spectacle of the fire-hose, I won’t forget it in the morning. Slowly, I drift off to sleep.
1st April, 2012 (Thirty-Two Days without Mushrooms) "Wombstone"
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8th April, 2012 (Thirty-Nine Days without Mushrooms)
I wake up at ten o’clock at night, having passed out drunk sometime in the afternoon. I am suffering from severe sinusitis. There is a constant sharp pain just below my right temple. It feels like someone threw a brick at my head. Stumbling into the kitchen, I re-assemble the fragments of memory remaining from the day – unable to determine if the pain is a result of an injury. I grab a beer from the fridge. Carlton draught; cheap shit, it tastes even worse than usual. Like a mouthful of unprocessed yeast. The beer re-aligns me. I walk into the bathroom and carefully check my head for blood and bumps, running my fingers through my hair across my scalp, discovering nothing. On top of the sinusitis, I have a toothache. Since leaving my toothbrush in a taxi, I haven’t brushed in over a week; haven’t been to the dentist in at least five years. My hair is greasy and thin. My pants are torn to shreds. Alcohol is rapidly destroying me. When I was taking mushrooms, I was fine.
My favourite part of drinking is the hangover. I’ve tried to explain this to people before, but it’s difficult to articulate. Basically the reason I like hangovers is because the hangover is the introspective part of the alcohol experience. I am using alcohol to compensate for the lack of mushrooms, and what I like about mushrooms is the introspection and self-awareness. When you’re drunk, you don’t give a fuck about anything. When you wake up, dehydrated, with a throbbing headache, and find yourself living in a swamp – you get depressed. I can’t help but think I’m a total fuck up. There’s no getting around it. And I like thinking I’m a total fuck up, because I am. Being aware of the problem is the first step towards solving it. So, I figure, as long as I’m aware that’s something. That’s what appeals to me about tripping.
Mushrooms are not about doing, they are about thinking. People who dwell in the psychedelic realm generally aren’t particularly productive, they just think about being productive. Mushrooms put things in perspective. They give you hope, make you realize what you need to do. And hope is better than despair. I’d rather live in a state of perpetual hope than a state of perpetual self-destruction. I’ve always criticized ecstasy for providing me with false happiness, but all drugs create mirages. Cocaine inflates the ego; deludes people into thinking they are amazing and mushrooms provide false hope. When I trip, I am positive about the future. But nothing ever changes, significantly. Because I keep tripping; keep hoping; and never do.
There are fifteen empty beers on the desk in front of me as I type this. I’d say there’s probably something like fifty empties in the house. All from the past couple of days. And that’s not including the ones I consumed elsewhere. I got into the habit of drinking at University. Even if I’m already late for a class, I’ll stop in at the pub and chug down a pint or two. The lecturers don’t seem to care, because I’m functional. Blind drunk, I am a better student than most. I get distinctions for everything, top of the class; I don’t even need to try. It occurs to me, frequently, that I might be capable of something incredible if I cut back on the drink and the drugs. I’ve experienced a bit of sobriety over these past fungi-free weeks. After a couple of days straight I become a genius again. It’s been so long since I’ve been sober, that I was worried I’d fucked up my intelligence permanently. Somehow, everything I’ve consumed over the past thirteen years has had no effect. I am invincible.
I grab another beer and sit down to watch The Ides of March. A warning comes on, telling me I’m burning the future of the Australian film industry, despite the fact that I rented the DVD from a video store. This warning, it’s intended for someone else. I should see a warning that tells me I am not invincible; a warning that says one day I will regret squandering my talents. After the movie finishes I grab another beer and write a short review. This is a hangover habit. Watching films and writing reviews. Probably because I usually wake up around midnight with nothing better to do.
The sinus pain is gradually diminishing the more I drink, along with the introspection. I put on another film, Born into Brothels. It is about a bunch of children who live in a brothel. They have nothing. The girls are destined to become prostitutes, the boys have fewer options. There is a scene with this guy, one of the fathers, is sitting on the side of the road smoking hash. I think to myself, he has an excuse. Siting there, getting fucked up all day. This guy, he has nothing. He’s not squandering his talents. He doesn’t have any talents. He has no education. No prospects.
I have every opportunity in the world.
I pause it on his face, and wade through my swamp to the fridge. I am running out of beer. Fuck. There are only two cans of Carlton, and an oversized Dutch import. It pisses me off that I’m running out of alcohol. At the same time, I’m happy. It is one o’clock in the morning. The shops won’t be open for eight hours. I run my tongue alongside the toothache; I can taste blood.
I’ve been counting down the days until I can have some mushrooms. Four days from now. Wednesday night. It has been unbearable, resisting. I haven’t tripped for almost five and a half weeks now. It’s been a couple of days since I’ve had any weed; I am no longer addicted to marijuana. When I trip on Wednesday, it’s going to be a total mind-fuck. I never would have believed how dependent I was on mushrooms until I tried to stop taking them for a prolonged period of time.
I’ve gone through withdrawals repeatedly from countless substances; quit amphetamines, opiates, cigarettes, alcohol and weed. I always thought that mushrooms weren’t addictive. That I took them because I wanted to take them; and, that they were good for me. Strangely, they have been the most difficult thing to kick. Without the false hope that psychedelics provide I am no longer content to dwell in the planning stage of life. I need to do or, failing that, knock myself out. I have become dependent on escapism; whether I escape by deluding myself or through sedation is largely irrelevant. The addiction revolves around non-reality. False hope; inflated ego; false happiness; oblivion; sexual obsession – all of these things are non-reality.
Drugs are mind-altering. They take you from the actual to the imaginary, in one way or the other. That is the appeal. People get addicted to drugs because they don’t like their lives. Chemical addiction is nothing. Heroin addicts don’t relapse because they suddenly become chemically inclined to do so. The desire is always there, as long as they remain opposed to reality.
If I want to take drugs recreationally, rather than being an addict, I need to stop taking drugs and fix my life. Remove the cause of addiction, rather than attempting to resist temptation forever. On Wednesday, when I trip, I need to think about these things. Mushrooms will break the alcohol- cycle, because they are far more introspective than hangovers. I want to stop drinking now, but the desire isn’t strong enough for it to happen. When I trip, I will think back about all the pain alcohol has caused me over the past six weeks. It’s happened before. It will happen again.
This cycle needs to break. I have to stop drinking permanently. I’ve found the best way to quit everything is to take non-recreational doses of mushrooms, like anti-depressants, then ween myself off them. That might sound insane, but it’s worked for me in the past. I think part of it is placebo. The fact that I am consuming a drug, even though it hardly has any noticeable effects, is better – for my non-reality addiction – than consuming nothing.
I grab another beer from the fridge, the last Carlton, and watch another film. Mao’s Last Dancer. Starting to feel a little drunk now, can still feel the pain in my head though. I need some medication. Some pain killers or something. I’ve been resisting the temptation to vaporize some weed, because I don’t want to be stoned anymore. But I will, when I run out of beer, if the pain is still there. I should probably go to the doctor and get some sinus medication. But that’s always next to impossible due to the whole speed-manufacturing issue. The doctors take one look at me and conclude that I’m an addict: which I am; an addict with severe sinusitis.
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