Essential Eccentricity

The Old Fart and I were having lunch yesterday in a booth near the restrooms, just across from the door to the kitchen.  The noise in the place was intense:  someone kept changing the station on the radio playing over the PA system, a bus person and at least one cook or dishwasher were either angry or clumsy or both, and several nearby conversations had jacked up their vocal volume in compensation.

From across the dining room behind me, I heard a loud vocalization that could have been a hysterical laugh, a cry of indignation, or of mortal pain.  The O.F. went on speaking, so I don't suppose he heard it.  He seems to be losing his hearing -- but it's hard to know if it's getting any worse.  As long as I've known him, he has apparently heard less than half what I say to him, and likes to crank the volume way up on his music.

But I digress.  The ambiguous cries were repeated with increasing volume.  Eventually, I saw the O.F. react.  He rose slightly from his seat, craning to see past me, but apparently didn't spy the source of those cries.  Next time the waitress sailed by, he flagged her down and asked if someone was being murdered over there.  I had been wondering if someone was having a baby.

The waitress paused for a moment and stuttered:  "It's a r-r- sp- special education student."   Then she was gone.  The O.F. rolled his eyes, and we exchanged a few words regarding political correctness as the cries continued to escalate.

Suddenly, the anguished vocalizations ceased entirely.  I suspected that someone had gagged or strangled the kid, until I saw a girl I took to be her trudging hurriedly toward the restrooms.  Instantly, I surmised that an urgent call of nature had motivated her distress calls.

Next, I saw her enter the nearest door, which happened to be the men's room.  Then, from that direction, I heard a somewhat muffled high-pitched scream.  Then, all grew silent.  Silence prevailed -- except for the pan-clanging, dish-clashing, radio-clamoring background noise -- for the next few minutes, as I kept an eye on the restroom door.

The girl didn't emerge, but eventually a big woman arrived from somewhere behind me, entering first the women's room, and then the men's.  Shortly after she entered the men's room, the girl emerged and walked back toward their booth, followed by the big woman, whose face was flaming red and her stride stiff with fury.  Neither before the girl had entered the men's room, nor after both of them departed, did I see any men go in there or come out.  It's all a minor mystery to me.

The first, last and ONLY time I ever injected LSD into a vein, I went on a journey unlike any other trip I ever had.

---

[Digression & Disclaimer]
It is entirely unnecessary to inject LSD.  Simply swallowing it works just fine.  I am convinced that it was my mindset and the setting I was in that made the difference in that trip.  The events described here occurred forty years ago, when I was relatively naive. 

I was a needle freak amphetamine addict, just out of jail.  I would have preferred to have been shooting speed, but all the meth dealers I knew were too paranoid to sell to anyone who had been busted and gotten out again, on the theory that such a person would have turned into a narc in the interests of saving him- or herself from conviction and incarceration.

In fact, I was already convicted and, not being thought to be a flight risk, was out on my own recognizance pending my pre-sentence investigation.  I would be going to prison about half a year later, but that is another story.  (The continuation of that story, the lead-in to it, and the rest of what I've written of my memoirs thus far, are linked from the right hand column here.) 

---

That night, in a strange place and strange company, with several young men who were injecting alcohol into their veins, I knew I did not want to do as they were doing.  I never have liked alcohol or any other depressant drugs.  By then, at the age of twenty-five, I understood that my own unaltered consciousness was freer and more comfortable than being on any kind of downers.  I had not yet learned how to alter my consciousness without drugs.  Someone offered me a clean needle and a tab of acid and I accepted.  After they had all passed out, I was left alone with my visions.

I have written previously about the details of that experience:  watching my face in a mirror as the flesh shrank and rotted from my bones, then falling away with no eyes left to see, but viewing as if from above as my mortal remains disintegrated and my body's atoms returned to life in other forms -- trees, animals, and eventually, into rocks and stars.


From my perspective, everything was different after that night.  I was changed forever.  Just as the flesh had fallen away in my vision, fears fell away from my mind.  Habits and conditioning remained, and much of the intervening four decades have been spent observing, examining and transcending social conditioning and personal habits.

About halfway through that forty-year period, I met Greyfox, my soulmate.  Now he is my lawful spouse, my partner in business and crime, and my beloved Old Fart.  But back then, twenty years ago, he was a newly-minted shaman sweating out his own initiation experience and just beginning to transcend his own issues, including depressant addictions and narcissistic personality disorder.

It perplexed him to learn, when he was teaching me about shamanism, that I had undergone my own initiation "effortlessly" (his judgment) twenty years before.  Due to the NPD, he was enraged each time he would share with me some new insight or discovery and I would spontaneously and innocently reminisce about when I had made the same step in my own development.

He has largely transcended the NPD that made it so important to him to be "first" or "best."  I had learned, a decade before I met him, not to make such comparisons between myself and others.  Greyfox is clean and sober now, and we can talk freely about our shared and separate discoveries.  Having him sharing his experiences with me is so many things to me:  fun, entertaining, inspirational, revelatory, humbling and more.

We don't agree on everything, and we don't need to.  There are enough areas of agreement to keep the dialogue going.  Some of them:  Dualism sucks.  Invidious comparisons can come around and bite you in the butt.  Personal pathways twist, turn, branch, cross, recross and turn back on themselves so much that the concepts of  "ahead" and "behind" become meaningless.  We are too involved right now with our own relationships to time to try and consider "first" or "last" or "sooner" or "later."  What is, IS
.