Brenda's Unfortunate Record Of The Week #5

Music

The house is dark. So is the sky but my hair’s a new shade of platinum.

This morning I spent four hours round my friend’s house, soaking up chemicals & getting it cut. The six-week ritual, another 6 weeks gone by. Rolling on top of each other, reminding me my life is only getting shorter. And yet time isn’t going by fast. I couldn’t say that, no. The journey from last week into now has been a crawl. Hands and knees, dragging myself through the viscous change of season. I like autumn, but all the smells, colours, sounds & light seem to conjure up ferocious nostalgia. Totally familiar & yet just beyond the grasp of experience.

The week started with Adam Curtis. I watched all 188 minutes the evening it was released (his chef d'oeuvre, in my humble opinion) and woke myself up in the night with a knock so loud, it battered me out of slumber. Seriously, like crystal clear, bailiff pounding on door, only it came from inside my head. Everything made sense in that single instance. I was outside the box, looking in, foreign in my own skin. The familiar surroundings of my bedroom melted away & I lay neither here nor there, suspended in time and space.

When I woke up the next morning I felt very strange. Displaced, totally drained & of course incapable of remembering any significant details. Fucking typical. I’ve been mourning my enlightenment ever since.

Maybe it’s time to do some acid. I’ve had the itch for awhile now, but it’s becoming more persistent. I normally say DMT is my favourite hallucinogen – non committal, you know? you can just dip your toes in – but after reading some Guardian piece about brain scans and Imperial College London studies, I’ve been all the more tempted. The article was written in April (which now feels proper vintage – before Brexit and all…) and talks about the drug ’reducing the restrictive thinking which occurs between infancy and adulthood’.

My heavy LSD days were decades ago. I started young. We used to score on Granville Street, downtown Vancouver. At $5 a hit for a night of fun, the frequency of use was down to pure economics. You didn’t have to worry about where you ended up. Even the most mundane park or parking lot could be hilarious. This was value for money. Amongst the good times, I also have bad memories of trips laced with strychnine. Coming down in ropey places, brain tensed & tugging, refusing to let go of the final relentless, dirty flickers. And then there were the traumas – getting locked in a closet by that nutty girl who didn’t want me going off with our other friends, the walls crumbling, at first suffocating me then pushing my limp & rotting corpse down into the pitch black underworld I knew I’d never climb out of. Or getting lost in the forest, alone & terrified, suffering painful jolts every time I tried to move. Convinced I was dead, I lay there all night. It wasn’t until the sun started to come up I realised I’d somehow managed to get tangled in an electric fence. Numpty.

I’d say my use peaked as an early teen and then I discovered ecstasy. Of course I’ve revisited the drug over the years, but it’s definitely been awhile. I’ve also become a bit more cautious with brain altering substance. I’m sure I’ve missed out many an opportunity, but I don’t wanna be messing about with grubby shit. Gimme some of that clinical ICL gear – straight from the university lab, please…. I’ve seen the scans.

All this pourquoi? My mind’s obviously capable of unleashing the ‘knock knock knock’ next-level awareness on it’s own accord. A trippy, insightful documentary just before bed and boom, voila! It’s not like many scribblings you manage to get down during a chemically induced journey mean much le lendemain. But there is that lingering wave of creativity (or at least sense of) you ride along over the following days. And that palpable taste of voyage. And now the science (although going back to Mr Curtis, I do wonder about correlation to current climate etc … like what did it do for the baby boomers? Durrr.). Anyway, my mid-night awakening didn’t quite tick all the boxes & I reckon it would take years of hippy-dip-shit-new-age training to guarantee a return, as and when I wanted. So why not resort to the little magic tab?

HyperNormalisation did leave more pertinent musings towards state of world, self etc … oh woe is me, grim indeed … but we’ll let those trickle out another time. I might be contradicting them in saying all this but seeing as I am a product of my environment, let it be known … I am on the hunt. If you have some laboratory grade LSD, you know where to send it.

And in the meantime, I’ll just sit here and let the music wash me through. Over to you, SAVE! Respect to ‘The Darkness’. May I transcend again soon.

*out this week on Les Disques De La Mort. Buy HERE.