From: pez@manhattan.com (Gizmo) Subject: The Adventures Of Smacks Past (Part 21) More About LSD, The "Son Of Sam" & Parallel Realties Date: 1996/10/01 newsgroups: alt.drugs.hard,alt.drugs,alt.drugs.usenet THE ADVENTURES OF SMACKS PAST (PART 21) MORE ABOUT LSD, THE "SON OF SAM," & PARALLEL REALITIES To me, the main motivation to use or abuse drugs is to change your state of consciousness. I would further add that "changing your state of consciousness" takes in all the other reasons that we say are our motivations. Some that come to mind would be, doing it because it makes you feel good, doing it because you're depressed, doing it because it's fun, because you're curious, because you are in pain. I think that no matter which one is a persons personal statement about why he or she does it, the nature of the beast is that "alternation in perception/consciousness" is the link pin behind the reason given. Even a reason as seemingly unrelated to consciousness alteration, such as, "I'm doing it because all my friends are doing it," could have a strong correlation in that if you want to feel like you are a (part of) this circle of friends, then doing the drug not only in itself alters your perception but the very act of becoming an accepted member of a group of people, is a change in your awareness. I'm sure all this could be argued to death. I don't know anything that can't be, but for the purpose of this story, I'm going to mention some of my personal motivations and experiences that I've had with all these drugs. For me, the alteration of consciousness was a central theme running through my life, probably back as far as when I was a toddler, but it was a more conscious theme since I was a teenager. It seemed to me, that the highest and best that a person might do or become would be to be more and more aware, more conscious etc. There seemed to be a connection between being more conscious and feeling better and being able to enjoy life more. The fact that I spent so many years seemingly blunting my senses with heroin does not completely invalidate the original motivation. Perhaps it was a slight detour that seemed to last all too long. Perhaps it was a lazy reaction to what seemed like too much effort to reach these so called more awakened states in a non-drug induced way. Whatever the reasons I gave myself then and now, it's the way it went. Who knows, maybe I did all of it so that I would have enough material to write about it someday?? Back to the title of this adventure. In late 1975, after the major bust I took in adventure 20, I settled into a pretty routine lifestyle. Well, sort of. I certainly wasn't about to try selling drugs to make a living. So I earned money doing different stuff. About this time I met my soon-to-be wife. We hit it off in a big way, and I came to find out that I met a kindred spirit in that she had also done some drugs along the way. She also seemed to have some understanding for some of the subject matter related to "expanded levels of consciousness." Avoiding hard drugs at the time, I embarked on another post 60's period of psychedelic experimentation. This led to a whole bunch of really neat excursions. Unlike heroin, cocaine or any other opiate type drug, LSD could open your brain and nervous system up to some extremely euphoric states. Earlier experimenters oft repeated comments about "seeing god, becoming one with the universe, being in touch with the heart of all creation etc., were not entirely off the rail. Certain people did seem to get to these places inside and indeed it did seem to be a whole lot more blissful than any heroin high. The rub of course is that LSD is precarious. You were never sure what you would get. So much depended on the dosage, the quality of the LSD, the place you took it in, your internal energies at the time, you're orientation etc., that it was a bit of a crap shoot. Which might explain some of our desires to ultimately go shoot smack. Hey, at least with smack you could be pretty sure that the results were always going to be the same. Anyway, each weekend we took some LSD. And each trip was usually very neat and insightful. Perhaps it was the tension and fear I had going on with my impending court case. Perhaps it was the real desire to see something that I couldn't normally see, that provided the prerequisite inner chaos to experience these ultimate journey's into unknown parts of my brain. On a number of occasions it would seem that me and my ex-wife were literally telepathic. We would seem to be able to communicate with each other without the need for words. On one such night we had a little interesting adventure. As I related in a previous adventure story, me and my ex-wife would drive up to New Paltz college and purchase some blotter acid from the college kids on campus. We would usually ingest a hit or two on the way home. Sometimes we would go for walks in the woods, sometimes we would simply park our car and enjoy the power of this most amazing drug. On this one particular weekend we were driving around upstate New York, looking for a nice quiet open space to park when we found one in the town of Kent, New York. It was a full moon that night and the sky was beautiful. We were still very much in love at the time and that, coupled with the LSD made for a magic almost impossible to describe, unless you've been there. After slowing the car down a while, we found a place to park just off a side road. There before us, lay a beautiful stretch of farm land. It was breathtakingly quiet. The sky was clear and the LSD was kicking in full swing now. We sat there staring into the heavens, listening to some good music and basically just getting swallowed up in the ecstasy of it all. The very real sensation of losing one's sense of self, or identity was not a frightful thing. To the contrary it was something you hoped for in these journey's. The seeming loss of self and identity were closely related to a huge leap in consciousness and bliss. This was the reason some of us became so "hooked" on this stuff. This was the reason that people practiced meditation, yoga, chanting, whatever. But this drug could propel you there in a flash. And so, we were there, once again. I'll give you a description of what that state was like. I came up with this description back then, and I think it can give someone who's never done this or experienced this a hint of what it was like. Picture that your whole life is like this long stretch of time that looks like a straight line. Kind of like this. _________________________________________________________________ Your born at one end and you die at the other. All the way through, going from left to right you are captive of the experiences and situations you go through. But any time a person can reach "escape velocity," either through a drug like LSD or in some other manner, it's like you are lifted above the horizontal line and you reach a place so far above it, that if you could look down, you would be able to see not only the line of your entire life, but the lines of lives and times stretching all the way back and forward into the future. It matters not when you make these vertical leaps, because no matter when you do, you always end up in the same place. An eternal here and now which is always the same. It's like you can be cut off from that "higher place" for long stretches of time, years even, but when you come back to it, it seems like you never left. You're home and that's all there is to it. Well, hope that helps. Anyway, me and my ex-wife are sitting in our car for probably over an hour or two, when we decide it's time to head home. I put the key in the ignition, start the car and put it in reverse to back out to the road. I notice that I'm going nowhere!! "Oh no, could I have gotten a flat?" I get out of the car to take a look at my tires. Boy am I in for a surprise. Seems like I did not take notice that the ground was very wet from last nights rain and my rear tires have been slowly sinking into the mud for the last hour or so. "No problem," I tell myself. I get back in the car, put the mother in reverse and hit the gas real hard. The tires spin, but the car goes nowhere. I start riding the shift back and forth. Gunning it each time, trying to jerk the rear wheels out of the mud. Under the influence of the LSD, this was turning into a scary situation. I mean if we couldn't get the car free, what were we going to do, knock on the door of some farm house? Hell, they might shoot us. We were in upstate New York. Northern Redneck territory! Finally I convinced my wife to try driving and I would try to push the car out. She couldn't work the shift the way I wanted and I suggested that she push and I would work the car. Well, my wife had on a very white fur coat, it being late winter and all, and her attempt at pushing the car and me spinning the wheels in the mud got her covered in the brown goo. In a matter of seconds her nice white coat was covered in mud. But finally after a few more tries we got the car free. Time to go home. Arriving at my apartment, laughing hysterically about all this, we entered the lobby of the building. As luck would have it the lobby had about four people waiting to go upstairs. Trying not to laugh was a bitch. We were flying and we realized that we must have both looked like something from the trenches. We rode up the elevator in surpressed silence trying not to crack a smile. Our fellow passengers kept sneaking peaks at us out of the corner of their eyes. Finally when we reached our floor we proudly marched out of the elevator without a hint of anything being out of whack. Back in my apartment we got out of our clothes and settled down to some music. The exquisite high was reaching a peak and all was well, when all of a sudden we both looked at each other suddenly! Both of us picked up on the same sensation. Here's what it was like. For a moment, we sat there and noticed that we both seemed to be tuning into a parallel universe. In this universe, everything was dying, screaming, writhing, suffering. It was like whole star systems were being burned and destroyed. It was totally eerie. It scared the shit out of us. And we noticed that if we just turned our attention from it, it would just go away. We noticed that we could focus and de-focus our attention between, the beautiful quiet, peacefulness of the evening and the hell of billions of beings being consumed in a some apocalyptic bloodlust. It freaked us out. But we "moved" away from this place and got into some other perceptions. At one point, in a very telepathic state, I asked the question to no one in particular, "what are all these feelings?" My wife answered in her normal voice, "what if it's all just one big feeling." And with that, the doors of perception flung wide open and for the next six hours or so, there were no further questions. We had become the answer! It was all just one huge feeling and one huge thought! And in our normal state we were only able to see, feel and process only a tiny fraction of that totality. Copyright 1996 Gizmo PS. A year or so later after I had moved out of that building, we heard on the news that David Berkowitz, the "44 Caliber Killer," AKA "Son of Sam" had been arrested. It was then that we found out that he had been living three floors upstairs from us all the time I was living there. All the stories came out about how weird he was. That he was a part of or a pawn in some really evil devil worshipping cult that was secretly operating in the part of town where we used to live. Me and my wife wondered to ourselves. Could we somehow back then, have gotten in touch with this persons weird energy? Or the energy that he had was taping into? An energy that led him to kill over twelve innocent women? An energy that made him one very weird person, who thought he was taking commands from a dog that lived around the corner? Could that have been the reason for those awful sensations of destruction we felt on that LSD trip, a year ago? Who knows?