It was my eighteenth birthday, and I was about to drop acid for the first time.
Up to this point, I’d never had the opportunity to try LSD. I was no stranger to recreational drug use – I’d try anything anyone handed to me, and my friend Casey and I had spent the last year spiraling downward through the catalogues of our local pill-pushers and sticky-flower salesmen. We were both highly intelligent, artistic, passionate young men stuck in a backwater town where the only social scene was the shopping mall and the height of culture was the new movie theater (the seats tilt backward!). This was a recipe for delinquency.
So, after narrowly avoiding a crippling opiate addiction, navigating the rapids of an ecstasy binge, and smoking ditchweed until I coughed up blood, I ran into a long-lost friend at a party. In high school, Chris and I had been two angry peas in a punk rock pod, both of us frustrated with the restrictions of adolescence. Unfortunately, there’s only so many niches in any given clique, and the two of us had always aimed for the same girls, the same jokes, the same shoes. Naturally this led to rivalry and discontent.
But now things were different! We had each drifted off into other social circles, developed our own respective personalities. When we ran into each other at a post-graduation party, we bonded quickly over a cigarette. Chris told me of his plans to move to Oakland and become a black-metal drummer. He also mentioned his newfound ability to see auras.
“What?” The contradiction short-circuited my brain.
“Yeah, man, auras. Like, I can see yours right now. It’s sort of a turquoise-green. And that girl over there is totally orange. Haven’t you ever taken acid?”
“Oh. Come talk to me once you’ve tried it, man. It’ll change your life.”
Armed with this seemingly iron-clad recommendation, and with a pocketful of graduation money ripe for the squandering, I spent the next couple weeks leveraging my black market contacts to find some of this philosopher’s stone. The Guy finally came through on my birthday. I decided to buy four hits – one each for Casey and his girlfriend April, the other two for me alone.
It was a hot night in July, and we drove to our favorite outdoor parent-free zone: the elementary school in the ghost town up the highway. The school was still active, and had a decent variety of silly playground equipment and large grassy fields for running in, with a significant lack of drive-by traffic or personnel. Besides, it was summer – who cares about an elementary school on a summer night?
When we got to the school, we entered our sanctuary under the playplace, where the plastic had been molded to look like a dinosaur fossil. We opened the crumpled aluminum foil to discover four sugar cubes, looking no different from the ones my mother would stir into her morning coffee. Presumably the drug, in liquid form, had been carefully droppered onto each little absorbent piece. We looked up at each other’s faces, excitement and uncertainty gleaming in our eyes, and popped the cubes into our mouths.
I didn’t know what I expected. Fireworks, maybe? A drum-roll straight out of a Kubrick flick? Something more climactic, at least, than the sweet dissolution of a cube, followed by a half-hour of waiting. Oh well – in the meantime we swung the swings, aped the jungle gym, and slid the slide.
It was on the slide that I noticed something interesting. The smooth green fiberglass had always been a miniature power plant, throwing static sparks wherever it contacted denim. But tonight it seemed to be magical, the sparks visibly stretching between my body and its surface, the crackling sound now suddenly apparent as tiny thunderclaps.
“How long has it been? Do you think it was bunk? It should have kicked in already, right?” Casey was always neurotic about the drugs. He couldn’t just have fun, let the experience be. He had to measure it, grade it, rate it. I suddenly realized how annoying that trait was, and decided to wander away.
I found myself on the asphalt basketball court, the blacktop so dark and the sky so moonless that I seemed to be standing on an invisible surface in deep space. I turned back to see if Casey had followed me, but the lights of the school buildings were hazy and obscured all detail. I dropped my little blanket and lay down on the ground, staring at the stars, spread-eagle on the warm tarmac.
The stars – they’d never danced this way before! It seemed that if I looked at one, the others would all flicker and move around a little bit. I tried to quickly swivel my eyes, to catch one in the act of sneaking away, but any that I stared at directly would freeze in place while my previous target began to wander. Eventually I managed to relax my eyes, focusing on the empty space between the stars and planets. The sky became a diorama, three-dee, the brighter stars obviously closer to me. I realized that I was not separate from “outer space” – Earth was floating in the same nothingness as all the gas giants and dwarf stars and black holes. I wasn’t laying down, I was stuck to. My body was like the figurehead of a massive space-boat, attached to the side, miraculously formed from the same materials as the rest of the planet.
I lay there for what seemed like hours, weeks, days. Eventually I remembered that I could move of my own volition, and I tried standing up.
What’s that light? Car! Trouble!
I noticed that I was crouched, a panther on the blacktop alert for any sign of motion. Without conscious effort, my survival instincts had kicked in and my animal nature was revealed. Of course, the car was just waiting at the stoplight, with the conscientious patience of a drunk driver fearing an unlikely trooper.
I began to drift back towards the playground. The lights were no longer just hazy: now they blurred, smeared, stretched as I attempted to orient my vision to a now-unfamiliar horizon. Everything was the same – no purple elephants here – but somehow everything felt different. I realized the difference between an oak tree, growing into its own unique shape, and a streetlight, molded by human intention for a lonely purpose. I saw the tiny plastic hut that I had walked past so many times before, dressed as it was in gingerbread colors, and realized that it had a tiny working door. Presumably, tiny people could live and work inside of it! Maybe elves lived here, and I had never noticed before. I leaned forward and pushed the door open with a finger.
Inside, no elves. In fact, the toy house was an empty shell on top of the bark mulch, barely big enough to fit a curled-up teenager. I know. I checked.
After a nice long rest in the elf house (during which I realized how truly strange bark mulch could be), I remembered my friends and decided to find them. I extricated myself carefully through the front door, although I could more easily have lifted the whole structure aside and stood up. I had not seen Casey and April on the playground, so I decided to go check the car.
As I walked to the car, it appeared to be moving while sitting still. I rationalized this as the aerodynamic look of a sporty Grand Prix, and admired the rainbows around all the streetlights and the way tree bark looked like Escher lizards. I was so joyfully distracted, in fact, that it wasn’t until I was reaching for the door handle that I looked through the windows.
The steamy, steamy windows.
One glimpse of pale, undulating flesh was enough for me. In the state that I was in sex seemed unthinkable, just as my sober mind recoils at the thought of a human being splitting down the middle like an amoeba. I whirled around and hurried away, thinking to myself I must forget that I saw that. I must forget. I MUST FORGET.
That was when I forgot everything.
Okay, not everything. I still remembered how to walk, for instance. But my identity vanished in that moment as a form of sudden amnesia took hold. As I walked towards this strange conglomeration of buildings I began to question my situation.
Who am I? What is this place, and why am I here? Why do I have this blanket wrapped around my shoulders in the heat?
For some still-unknown reason, the answer to all the questions became obvious (although quite wrong): I was the Mad Monk, this was my Mad Monastery, and this was my Mad Robe. I was here to meditate and contemplate my way to enlightenment. I picked a likely tree, and sat down.
As I sat, wrapped comfortably in my blanket and my delusions, I watched the sky lighten. I surely sat for at least three hours, motionless, watching.
The trees rustled. Were they being pushed around by the wind, like an invisible painter’s brush blending greens and browns? Or were they waving their arms insistently, pushing the air until a slight breeze brushed my face? It seemed I could see the wind itself, ripples of energy like waves in a pond, changing constantly with the inescapable momentum of time.
I began to see cars trundling down the road. I was quite visible, of course, sitting cross-legged under a tree at the front of the school, but I felt no fear. These people were in bubbles. Each had their own little climate-controlled environment, with their own preferred radio-host blithering, and their own worries and stresses and goals. None looked any direction except forwards, intent on their destinations. Each was already living in some future or some past, none aware of their current surroundings.
The streets were tubes along which the bubbles slid smoothly. The boundaries of fence and curb defined the Somebody Else’s Problem fields of property, so that the residents could safely ignore their neighbors’ lives. Nobody was going to school today, so the school was Nobody’s Problem, and my monastery was safe.
I could hear birds beginning to chirp, greeting the day with their usual bicker and squabble. The pattern became more complex as more birds awoke, and as the sun crested the pines it was announced by a chorus of roosters. I could hear every little sound, for miles it seemed, the cars and the birds and the wind and the stars and my own breath, dancing in a perfect rhythm.
Suddenly my perception flipped inside out. Instead of hearing sounds, I could hear the profound silence, the space in which all the sounds resided. Like a Necker cube suddenly facing the other way, like the stars in my diorama, the sounds were just infinitesimal blips floating in an infinite nothingness. But this time, I didn’t feel at one with the Earth. I didn’t feel at all, in fact. My sensations of touch and smell, light and sound were also just waves in this sea of emptiness. There was no “me,” there.
There was no “there,” there.
Pure consciousness resided in this infinite void for eternity, and Max was part of it.
But life as ALL is no fun. It’s also no pain, no suffering, no love, no tree. It’s not loneliness: there’s nothing to miss. It’s only-ness. Eventually, pure consciousness decided to play a game of hide-and-seek with itself, and split a small part of itself off to be trapped, once again, in the bodymind called Max, the Mad Monk of Earth, to discover itself again later.
I regained myself shortly after dawn, with the blissful feeling of transcendence still lingering in my cells. I remembered my personal history, and yet I remembered my true nature. I rounded up Casey and April – sweaty and exhausted and silly by now, and mostly clothed – and they decided we would head for the coast. I didn’t care where we went. I was free.
Not free as in speech, mind you, or even free as in beer. I had broken through the illusion of self and found it to be as ephemeral as spiderweb lingerie. Once I realized that I was no more and no less than a diamond cog in a manufacturing plant for light, once I had found my physical body and mental ego to be emergent properties of ultimate consciousness, I was in free-fall and had nowhere to be.
I phoned my parents and told them I was going to the beach. They were surprised, especially because I hadn’t been known to even get out of bed at that hour of the morning, much less travel three hours on a mountain road. I didn’t mind. Their confusion would arise and pass, as eventually they would construct a mental model to explain my behavior. Consequences, should there be any attached, were inextricably linked as the future to the past and were therefore already suffered and transcended. Parental restrictions, in fact all of society’s norms and regulations, were like the plastic elf house: open the door, look out the window, play the game of custom and habit, but at any moment shrug! And the whole structure sloughs off.
I knew, too, that the game Casey would want to play after our drive – colloquially known as “let’s get high, look, I bet that guy’s got a hook up,” was equally mundane and superfluous. I had no idea, when I first tongued that sucrose prism, that it was the high to end all highs. In fact, in later months I would even lose the illusion that LSD was the philosopher’s stone. It may have been the trigger on the gun that blew my mind, but the bullet was pure meditation. When I sat down that July dawn, with nothing to do, I stumbled upon the way to do No-thing.
I would later have to leave Casey, after many attempts to open his eyes found me drained and dull. I found new friends and new paths, new games to play, but I play differently now. Whenever I get too serious, whenever my mouth purses and my head aches, when the weight of the elf house sits too heavily upon my brow, the Mad Monk returns to me with a laugh of delight and a joke or a rhyme: Forget! Now sit! Don’t worry about it!
