Eerie Tom (ago)

Warning: spoilers ahead!

Recently, I re-watched “And The Children Shall Lead”, an episode from the third season of the original Star Trek series. It is generally regarded as one of the worst episodes of that series; there is an interesting premise but it comes off rather half-baked. There are plenty of reviews on the internet that pick it apart, but I’m going to dig into some aspects that were not addressed by the episode nor by any of those reviews.

Plot Summary
The Enterprise responds to a distress call from the planet Triacus, where a group of families, led by Professor Starnes, has been conducting a survey. Captain Kirk and crew discover all the parents dead, apparently by suicide. Their young children are alive and physically healthy, but seem oblivious to the fact their parents have died. Dr. McCoy guesses the children may have developed amnesia in the face of whatever traumatic event caused the parents to take their own lives. Everyone beams up to the ship so the children can be taken to Starbase IV for medical observation. However, the children are under the sway of “Gorgan”, a non-corporeal humanoid who has turned the children against their parents and is using them as his “soldiers” in an attempt to conquer the universe. The children also seem to have paranormal powers which they use to control the Enterprise crew through nightmarish hallucinations. Eventually, Kirk is able to make the children realize the truth. As they finally mourn their parents’ deaths, Gorgan’s hold upon them loosens, and without the children’s loyalty, he fades into nothingness.

Analysis
Spock speaks of a gang of marauders that terrorized and pillaged a local star system, until the inhabitants revolted and destroyed them—all except one, who hid or was imprisoned in a cave “for centuries”. One member of the Starnes party, Professor Wilkins, unwittingly unsealed the cave, allowing this sole survivor—Gorgan—to escape. Gorgan then influences the children against their parents. He was undoubtedly a corporeal being when it was imprisoned, yet his transformation into a non-corporeal being is never addressed. And how does a cave keep such a being imprisoned—couldn’t he just escape through the walls? And how did he get to the Enterprise? Would the transporter be able to beam a non-corporeal being at all? Shouldn’t there be some kind of alarm indicating there were more entities being beamed than expected?* Or did Gorgan just sit around on Triacus until summoned by the children?

Did Gorgan bestow the paranormal powers upon the children? If so, then he is able to interact on at least a psychic level with corporeal humans. When Gorgan’s influence is shaken from the children, he fades away. It seems Gorgan was absorbing energy from the children, so how did he survive in the cave all those centuries with nobody around to sustain him? Was he just an inert blob of evil waiting for a catalyst?

And I really roll my eyes when anyone says they want to “conquer the universe”. Just conquering a galaxy would be quite a feat, no matter how many followers and resources one has. And what’s an insubstantial marauder going to do once he’s conquered the universe, anyway? Gloat?

Spock says Starnes’ party is the first exploration of Triacus. It seems highly unlikely adults would bring young children to a completely unexplored planet—imagine if this had happened in the episode “The Galileo Seven”! But I wonder: what if, like the kids in the 1964 film Children of the Damned, they were born with paranormal powers instead of getting them from Gorgan? Perhaps the parents brought them to Triacus partly so they could grow up in as normal and loving an environment as possible, without judgment or fear from others.

Now imagine these children as adults serving in Starfleet with their powers! A sequel film about these kids, now grown, might have been interesting! But such a poorly regarded episode is unlikely ever to be addressed again!

*Apparently not, as we have seen in the episode “Wink of an Eye”.

Immortality is a common trope in science fiction. There are frequently characters who, if they have not achieved actual immortality, are extremely long-lived. But what does immortality actually imply? Let’s discuss some definitions first. Be warned: there are many spoilers below!

Immortality just means you live forever, right? But what does that mean, physically? Do you continue aging but just don’t die? If you lived to be 300 would you just be a bag of sagging skin and bones and liver spots? What about your organs? Would they slowly deteriorate? Or would you stay looking youthful? If so, at what age does your body stop aging? Presumably, unless you were born immortal, you stop aging at whatever age immortality was conferred upon you. But even if you were born immortal, one assumes you don’t stay a baby forever. It’s a convenience that in such stories, immortals usually stop aging when they reach their physical prime in adulthood.

In the original Star Trek series episode “Plato’s Stepchildren”, our heroes encountered aliens called Platonians who were long-lived. Their leader, Parmen, was born in 44BC, and his wife, Philana, in 32BC. Philana claimed she had stopped aging when she was 30. The actors playing them, Liam Sullivan and Barbara Babcock, were 45 and 31 at the time they filmed the episode. Parmen and Philana, like most of their fellow Platonians, had achieved longevity through a eugenics program.

In another episode, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”, Kirk and crew encountered a Cheronian named Bele who said he had been pursuing an escaped political prisoner for at least 50,000 Earth years. This longevity seemed to be a natural condition of his race. Actor Frank Gorshin was 35 when he played Bele. In “Requiem for Methuselah”, there is a human named Flint who was born in 3834 BC, played by James Daly, who was 51 at the time. His seeming immortality was due to an ability of instant tissue regeneration.

A group of humans, calling themselves Eternals, shut themselves off from the rest of the race in the 1974 film Zardoz, and achieved immortality by way of a supercomputer called The Tabernacle. One character, Arthur Frayn (played by Niall Buggy when he was about 26) claims to be 300 years old.

Now let’s look more deeply at what constitutes immortality. The Platonians may have been long lived but they were also highly susceptible to even minor injuries—a mere scratch could be life threatening. When the Enterprise reached the planet Cheron, Spock discovered everyone on the planet was dead, meaning Cheronians weren’t conventionally immortal--they had all murdered each other in a race war. Flint, as Dr. McCoy discovered, had lost his immortality when he left Earth and would eventually die. In Zardoz, the Eternals could still die from conventional means—for example, Arthur Frayn fell to his death, but his body was instantly regenerated by The Tabernacle. Also, in the society of the Eternals, any act of rebellion was punished by forced aging, which caused some of the rebels to look quite elderly, weak, and frail.

Is there a difference between being immortal and invulnerable? In the Space: 1999 episode “End of Eternity”, the Alphans encounter an alien named Balor who boasts of being immortal. Similar to the X-Men’s Wolverine, Balor is capable of being injured but has an accelerated healing ability—the episode begins with Balor caught in an explosion and gravely wounded but within minutes he’s fully healed. In the end, he is trapped in an airlock and blasted into space. If he can be injured, then surely he would succumb to the effects of being in a vacuum. Unlike in the movies where an unprotected person in space explodes, in real one would suffer a number of other effects, but let’s concentrate on just one: with no oxygen to breath, an ordinary person would fall unconscious then die. So if that happened to Balor, if his body was then brought back into a normal environment, would he come back to life? Or would he actually, finally die?

In The Avengers story “Born Again (And Again and Again...)” (issue #218, cover date April 1982) the Avengers met a boy who, if he died, would instantly regenerate a new body. There is a scene where he stows away aboard a rocket ship not meant to carry passengers. As the rocket takes off, the boy goes through a series of rapid deaths and regenerations, staying alive just long enough in between deaths to reprogram the rocket to fly into the sun, where he hoped the intense heat would be enough to permanently kill him.

Taken to the extreme, what if you were truly immortal and impervious to harm? Does that mean that when our sun goes nova and Earth is destroyed, you’d just be floating in the vacuum of space? Would you still be alive then? If you are impervious to all harm does that mean you don’t need food or oxygen or water? If not, would floating in space for all eternity just be nothing but sheer torture, unable to eat or breathe, freezing in the vacuum, and yet unable to die?

Another aspect science fiction tends to associate with immortality is that with it comes boredom. The Eternals have been alive for “only” a few hundred years but they’re bored and they just want to die. Flint says he’s had to endure watching too many loved ones die. But to me that’s just a lack of imagination on the part of the writers! I’m not saying it would be fun to watch your loved ones die, but after all, the rest of us are not immortals, and we’ve seen loved ones die, maybe several, and yet somehow most of us still carry on!

As for boredom, I feel like I simply don’t have time to study or do everything I would love to! I don’t have time to keep up with all the ideas I get for stories and songs and art. If I were immortal with all the time in the world, would I ever reach the point of having learned and experienced everything? I doubt it. Someone born in the 1940s could not have guessed we’d have cell phones, computers, the internet, etc.

If one were truly immortal, wouldn’t one’s sense of morality or philosophy change? It would be like if one could read minds, or fly, or turn invisible, or teleport. Having such abilities would fundamentally change you. I doubt very much one would stay the exact same person you were before you could read minds. One might despair over reading all the ugliness that people think about, or one might actually see the beauty in everyone and feel more optimistic.

If you thought you might live forever, that might change your philosophy. They say, don’t wait too much, you never know when you might die. Do what you want to do in life, you may never get another chance! Would immortality thus make you lazier?

And if you were immune to harm, you might turn to a life of crime! If nobody could kill you, you might go rob banks or kill people wantonly and laugh as the bullets bounce off of you. I suppose they could still drag your ass to jail, let’s just hope you don’t get a life sentence! LOL

But you might also realize you could use your abilities for good. You would make a very good firefighter because you couldn’t be harmed. So immortality, like any other thing in life, could be a blessing or a curse, or both. There are able-bodied people who see nothing but what’s wrong with their lives, and there are people in wheelchairs or people who are blind or deaf who still manage to enjoy life and count their blessings.

Think about the religious idea of immortality in the afterlife. You die, you get judged, and then you go to heaven or hell where you spend the rest of eternity. It would not be fun to burn for eternity, but what would heaven be like? The idea that everything is perfect and beautiful and wonderful, wouldn’t that get boring? What if someone you love very deeply ended up going to hell? Wouldn’t you be upset thinking that they were being forever tortured? Or would your memories be erased so you wouldn’t think about them? But memories are like a house of cards. Remove an important one and the rest collapse.

It’s an interesting idea, but it never seems fully explored. I wouldn’t choose immortality, but wouldn’t say no to a longer life if I stopped aging, or maybe some kind of delayed aging agreement? “Okay, Joe, we guarantee you will live to be 150, and you will not physically age until you turn 149, and then aging will rapidly catch up with you.” I think I might just agree to that!

Earlier this year, I walked through part of the northwest industrial area of Portland (the area around the Montgomery Park building) and intended to go back and check it out at night (while stoned, which I wasn’t the first time), and that day finally came. I mapped out my course: starting at the Montgomery Park building, I would head north via Wardway, then west on Nicolai Street/St. Helens Road, east on Industrial Street, then south on 26th Avenue back to Vaughn Street. I took my tincture and had a late dinner, so it would be past civil twilight when I began my walk.

I reached Montgomery Park, but was disappointed that the big sign wasn’t illuminated. I guessed the lights of the letters had simply burned out over the years and never were replaced—a common phenomenon these days, unfortunately. I still intended to take a few pictures. I got out my phone, lined up the shot, and just as my finger was only a half inch away from tapping the screen—and I swear I’m not making this up—the lights came on! How was that for magical timing?


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The first part of Wardway and Nicolai St/St. Helens Rd reminded me of Japan: quiet, clean, a few buildings lit by streetlamps, some park-like areas. But after 30th or so, there was a change: it became a little grungier: older buildings, signs with “classic” fonts and logos, a bar with honky-tonk music coming out of it. I started feeling a bit like Jim Rockford, sleuthing on a case somewhere in industrial Los Angeles. Explanation: I had begun watching The Rockford Files for the first time a few months ago after seeing James Garner in an episode of Maverick, and found Rockford to be an engaging character and role model: an assertive guy who would prefer not to fight, but can take care of himself when the need arises.

Since moving into my new digs back in February, I haven’t had the chance to have my monthly cigar. No smoking permitted in the apartment, of course, but also not on the balconies. One had to go down to street level. However, for me, a cigar is something to be enjoyed and savored, something for relaxing, and standing on a sidewalk while pedestrians and cars go by (especially with the combination of a busy intersection and construction since before I moved here) is anything but relaxing. I figured I could have a smoke without anyone hassling me while going through the industrial area at night—and I brought a portable ashtray along, too. Alas, it was a particularly windy night, and it was difficult just lighting my cigar, much less keeping it lit.

After turning east on Industrial St, I reached an area near some railroad tracks (about 500 feet east of St. Helens Rd). I could hear a dog barking from behind a building. It finally appeared, unleashed. I guessed the owner would soon appear as well, but one never did. I wasn’t sure of the breed, but it resembled a bull terrier. The dog stopped in the middle of the street and began barking and growling at me. I was smart enough to not just turn and run, so I stopped and kept an eye on it. It neither approached nor retreated, but it kept barking. Since I wasn’t sure if it was guarding one of the buildings (it seemed odd a watchdog would be running loose) or just a stray (and possibly rabid), I decided the best thing to do would be to go back the way I came instead of trying to go around it. Again, I didn’t just immediately turn and start walking. And I was still trying to light my damned cigar! It was at that point I felt my most Rockford-ish and wished I had been wearing a sports jacket and that someone had been there to snap a picture of me: late at night, looking like Rockford, facing down a possibly dangerous dog, but standing my ground while trying to light my cigar. Was that the epitomy of cool or what?

So see? I do know when to be careful while stoned!

Failing utterly in my attempt to light my cigar, I gave up and took a few steps backwards—the dog didn’t advance. I took a few more steps, then turned slightly to walk sideways (still watching the dog), then finally began walking forward, heading west back to St. Helens Rd. I took a few glances over my shoulder, but the dog didn’t advance, although he was still barking at me. After walking about 50 feet, I suddenly heard a man shouting: You son of a bitch! Get your motherfucking ass in here! You goddamn fucking dog! No idea from where the voice was coming, but obviously the dog wasn’t a stray. I looked: the dog hadn’t moved, and the man was still screaming. And he was still screaming after I had walked another couple hundred feet!

I wished I had at least thought to take a picture of the dog!

Maybe I should’ve stopped at the honky-tonk for a whiskey to celebrate my Rockford-ness!

For the last several weeks, I’ve become more interested in hiking while stoned, so I’ve been exploring a lot of new areas for me. One such area was the section of the Springwater Corridor that runs just east of the Willamette.

The corridor was a narrow paved path that seemed to be only for bicyclists, so I checked the signs carefully to make sure pedestrians were allowed. It didn’t say they weren’t, so I proceeded, walking to one side and keeping an eye out for approaching bicycles. Here and there were dirt paths paralleling the paved trail, which made it easier to avoid them. The bicyclists would whiz by very quickly; I felt like I had stumbled across a secret express lane for elite bicyclists to get around Portland.

To the left (facing east), was a tall line of trees on a hill, which made them seem even taller. Barely visible through the tops of those trees was what seemed to be an elevated highway (it was actually SE Grand/SE McLoughlin). With this odd combination of beautiful nature and the elevated road, it seemed there should be a monorail up there. It all felt somewhat utopian, like a scene from a sci-fi film.


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I came to another section of the tall trees. I was instantly reminded of the moai on Easter Island. Were these trees then, Portland’s moai? I felt like I had discovered a holy place. This area was full of dragonflies, which buzzed around quite audibly.


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After I left the Moai Area, I reflected upon how much I enjoyed the sound of the dragonflies. And then I thought, didn’t it sound a bit like my tinnitus? I’ve been suffering from moderate tinnitus for about a year now, and there are periods where it seems more acute and noticeable than others, and particularly so these last few weeks. I try not to think about or dwell on it; I’ve tried to make peace with the idea I’d never hear total silence again, for it’s easy to “catastrophize” the condition. So how could I find one sound enjoyable and not the other? (of course, one answer is I can always walk away from the dragonflies) And that’s when I decided I had a tiny dragonfly in each ear. Since real dragonflies need to eat and rest and can’t flap their wings constantly, the dragonflies in my ears must be robots with an indefatigable power supply, buzzing endlessly. I wondered, when their host (me) dies, what will happen to them? Will they just keep buzzing in my skull for all eternity? Will they fly out and find a home in someone else’s ears? Of course there aren’t actually tiny robot dragonflies in my ears, but as I have a bit of a cyborg fetish, I like the idea that there are. Anything that makes me tolerate the tinnitus better, even such an obviously fanciful idea.

While walking on the path, I saw a man ahead sitting under a tree with his bicycle parked nearby. He was playing what sounded like old-school Eurodisco music on a portable radio. I appreciated the incongruity; most people play tunes on their phones these days. From the way he was behaving, I guessed he was also in an altered state of consciousness. As I got closer we both nodded and smiled at each other, and that’s when I noticed that he looked just like Snoop Dogg. Now, I didn’t really think it was Snoop out there all by himself. While everyone needs solitary time now and then, Snoop doesn’t seem the type to be out in public without an entourage or some bodyguards. But I looked online, and this article says he was in Eugene, OR less than a week before, so it very well might have been him! And if it was Snoop, then I could just kick myself for not at least saying hi! (however, the guy I saw seemed a little younger than Snoop)

The nearby Oregon Rail Heritage Center offers open air train rides along the Corridor. One passed me, then eventually disappeared from sight but I could still hear its bell. As it got further and further away, the sound “degenerated” until it was mostly echo, and mostly the higher frequencies, so it sounded like a celesta. Ordinarily it’s the higher frequencies that roll off with distance, but perhaps my “enhanced hearing” made a difference?

Although I had taken my usual dose that day, it sure hit me much harder than usual. Some sounds seemed somewhat distorted and became almost unrecognizable. I felt a little dizzier than usual while walking. I wasn’t alarmed, just a little surprised, but also oddly unconcerned. Shouldn’t I have been more concerned? Shouldn’t I have just gone back home, or at least sat somewhere until the effect had peaked? Was I so high that I was throwing caution to the winds? And then it occurred to me that each time I heard a bicycle approach, I would instinctively get over as far as possible, so obviously I wasn’t so unconcerned I might do something foolish. I thought about this, and then came to this conclusion (dictated into my phone that day, edited for clarity):

There are those who skydive or similar for the thrill. There are those who climb impossibly high mountains or dive from space for the thrill. So why can’t one explore one’s mental universe for the thrill? Because I’m walking outside and I am really fucking dizzy and I feel like I should feel more concerned, yet I don’t! I understood that I had to concentrate on my walking because I was stumbling a little more than usual, and yet I didn’t feel concerned, and that’s when I thought, maybe in my own way, I am just one of those thrill-seeking types?

It was later that I discovered the word psychonaut. While doing cannabis has been a lot of fun and has helped with my overall self-esteem and depression, I enjoy the insights and flights of fancy I get. And besides cannabis and (dreaming about) magic mushrooms, I’ve long kept a dream journal (for my dreams tend to be very long and quite vivid, not the “I dreamt I saw a dog cross the street” variety), have tried guided imagery and meditation before, and so on. It’s more fun to say I’m a stoner, but really, I’m a psychonaut.

Finally, a few random anecdotes:

⇒ I swear I’m not making this one up. On the way from OMSI Station to the start of the trail, I saw a building for a company called TRD Motors which, of course, I read as turd. And the first thing I thought was, I hope their advertising slogan isn’t “Put a TuRD in your driveway!”

⇒ While eating lunch earlier, I was reading on my phone that dimetrodons (don’t know why I was thinking of dimetrodons) were not true dinosaurs, but also existed 40 million years before the dinosaurs appeared. It’s not that I didn’t know how old the earth was (especially since I once recorded a piece of music called Gondwanaland, which contained a segment entitled “Six Billion Years Pass”), I guess I had never really thought about it before, and had a bit of a hard time wrapping my head around those figures, the idea that the earth formed some 4.5 years billion ago ... humanity’s presence here barely registers as a blip on the timeline.

⇒ I also read an article that said it’s a myth that rabbits love carrots (don’t know why I was thinking of rabbits, either). It said rabbits prefer green leafy vegetables, because they find carrots too sweet. Can you imagine Bugs Bunny carrying around a big head of cabbage and munching on it as if it were an apple? lol

⇒ As one of the open air trains passed, I waved at the passengers and some waved back. However, waving at them distracted me just enough that I stumbled pretty dramatically on the path, though I stayed on my feet. The first thing I thought was, every parent on that train probably pointed at me and said, “Look kids, it’s the town junkie. Don’t do drugs, m’kay?” lol

March 5, 2024

City Limits (MST3K version), dir. Aaron Lipstadt, 1985
The Tale of the Heiki, Akira Sakata, 2011
The Lost Episode of Star Trek, 2021 (watch on YouTube here)

March 8, 2024

Repo Man, dir. Alex Cox, 1984

March 12, 2024

KDGJ-TV, dirs. multiple, 1993

KDGJ-TV is a series of video clips I made with my friend Duane and my brother Kain. We “played television station” and improvised commercials, a talk show, sitcoms, and so on.

Best Chillout Space Futuristic, dir. unknown, 2021?

In a recent blog, I mentioned how some of the courses in Mario Kart were like “hyperTokyo”, a “futuristic Tokyo even cooler than it is now, with science fiction architecture, Möbius strip pathways, gravity-defying zones, and huge entertainment complex space stations in geosynchronous orbit.” Coincidentally, while looking for trippy videos to watch, I found this one, and wow, if it isn’t a depiction of hyperTokyo, I don’t know what is. Impossibly tall skyscrapers, floating buildings rising far above what is surely the limits of a breathable atmosphere, and structures in all kinds of architecturally-impractical shapes. I know it’s all computer-generated animation, but I still can’t imagine how anyone, even a whole team of people, created this. I also substituted other music when I watched it, namely Holger Flinsch’s 2007 DJ set “Nachtnetz”, available for free download here.

March 16, 2024

Being from Another World (MST3K version; aka Time Walker), dir. Tom Kennedy, 1982
Dr. Strangelove, dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1967

As I had done with Evil Under the Sun and Master of the Flying Guillotine, I thought it was time to “psychedelic-ize” another film, and chose Dr. Strangelove. I didn’t want to repeat the same video and audio effects from the previous two efforts, which sometimes got boring once the novelty wore off. Despite this, though the final result was entertaining in parts, the rest was still a little boring, so I’m not even going to post a video excerpt, though I was rather proud of the mashup I did of the film’s final song (“We’ll Meet Again”) with an instrumental version of Enya’s “Orinoco Flow”.

March 19, 2024

Separate entry: “A Trip to IKEA”

The Benny Hill Show, “Is This Your Life”, dir. John Robins, 1969
Cool and Crazy, Shorty Rogers and His Orchestra featuring the Giants, 1953
Unknown World, dir. Terrell O. Morse, 1951

March 23, 2024

The Twilight Zone, “Where is Everybody?”, dir. Robert Stevens, 1959
Kid A Mnesia Exhibition, Radiohead, 2021
Who Finds a Friend Finds a Treasure, dir. Sergio Corbucci, 1981

March 26, 2024

The Human Duplicators (MST3K version), dirs. Hugo Grimaldi and Arthur C. Pierce, 1965
Shaolin Dolemite, dir. Robert Tai, 1999

March 29, 2024

Separate entry: “A Dream of Allen”

The Benny Hill Show, “Undercover Sanitary Inspector”, dir. John Robins, 1971
The Legend of Suram Fortress, dir. Sergei Parajanov, 1985

Disclaimer: the following is purely a work of fiction, based on a dream I had.

So in July 2023 I wrote an essay about what I experience while doing cannabis, which concluded thusly:

I’m currently reading a book called “Your Psilocybin Mushrooms Guide” by Michelle Janikian (Ulysses Press, 2019). I’ve never done LSD or mushrooms or other psychedelics, but I’ve long been curious after reading the profound experiences of people like Steve Jobs, Harry Nilsson, Carl Sagan, Gerald Heard, etc., even after just one-time experience. Heck, actor Jack Nicholson said he had seen the face of God, which is exactly how I felt while watching Noh actors or Nomad. Janikian’s descriptions of how psilocybin feels sounds very much like my experience with THC. It just makes me wonder; if I trip out this much on THC, what will happen when I try mushrooms?

Well, I finally had the opportunity to find out, kinda: I dreamt that Allen Ginsberg had come back from the dead and was standing on a hill near my home. He was waving semaphore flags and “said” he had scored some ’shrooms and would I like to try them? He also volunteered to be my trip-sitter. Naturally I said heck, yes!

We set aside March 29, 2024. Before the big day, I read the Janikian book again for tips and advice on how to have the best trip and what to expect. I got everything set up:

✱ I meditated that morning to clear my head of any stressful issues.
✱ By my bed, I placed: a few CDs, some incense, a journal, a sketch pad, and some pens and markers.
✱ I picked up a few snacks for Allen; he told me he was particularly fond of takoyaki and empanadas de viento.
✱ I cut up some cantaloupe and mango for myself, and put some ginger ale in the fridge in case of nausea.
✱ Once Allen arrived, I put my phone on airplane mode.

So we flew first class on Aegean Airlines to Larissa, Greece and got some steamed armadillo gyros for lunch and brought them back. Allen had brought approximately five tons of ’shrooms in a submersible U-Haul truck. I decided to start with a 2 gram dose. I thought they’d have a very bitter taste, but no, they tasted like ordinary mushrooms. We then ate our lunches.

About 45 minutes later, I could feel the effects. We stayed sitting at the dining table and talked at length about this and that. The feeling was similar to what I experience with cannabis, only more intense. I don’t know that I felt the usual time-dilation, and I don’t think I got cotton-mouthed, but both might be due to the fact we were chatting. I did not, however, experience hallucinations, either visually or aurally.

I finally wondered if perhaps chatting was distracting me from experiencing it more deeply, so he suggested we listen to some music. The intensity peaked around this time and I was tremendously dizzy but still able to walk unaided. As I walked, my jaw dropped open and I said, “Wowwww!” But I felt like it kept opening and opening. I remember thinking, “Just how far open is my mouth now? Surely it can’t open any further!”

We began with a couple of tracks from a gamelan CD. I love gamelan music; I even recorded my own composition years ago ...

Watch on YouTube

Allen hadn’t heard gamelan music before, so I also brought up a video on YouTube, and from there I played VJ for a while. Unfortunately, most of the vids can’t be embedded here, so links are provided (all open in new windows):

Link	“Gamelan and Dances”, performers unknown
Link	“Moma Houbava” and “Sama Li Si Den Zhanala”, Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir
Link	“Roam”, The B-52s
Link	“Aram Zam Zam”, Diskoteka Avariya
Link	“Fushizen na Girl / 不自然なガール”, Perfume
Link	“Fireworks”, GusGus
Link	“Special”, Mew
Link	“Windowlicker”, Aphex Twin (warning: contains considerable profanity and racial slurs)

By the time we finished, the effect was beginning to wear off and I felt I could be left unsupervised, and Allen left. I would like to point out that, at no point during this entire experience, did I feel anxious, paranoid, or nauseated. The whole experience had been quite intense, but thoroughly enjoyable. That’s not saying anyone else doing ’shrooms will have the same experience. A lot depends on dosage, experience, set and setting, doing homework on the subject, and one’s general approach:

Drugs: do you do them? What do you think of them? – Tom C. (Nottingham, UK) Kind of what I think of cars. Cars can be incredibly useful, fun, and life-changing if you understand how cars work and know how to drive safely. If you don’t know anything about driving or you tend to drive recklessly, you’re probably not ready to use cars. —blogger Tim Urban, of WaitButWhy.com (source)

And though I had a really good time, I did feel a tad disappointed that the experience wasn’t much different than being super-stoned. Again, part of that may be due to the distraction of company. I was tempted to take another dose and turn in to see what would happen, but I figured I’d had enough for one day and decided to do that another time.

And then I woke up! End of dream!

Over the last several weeks I’ve been watching a lot of Eurospy films (aka “spaghetti spy” films), as well as those trying to cash in on the success of the 1976 remake of King Kong (dir. John Guillermin), such as A.P.E. (1976, dir. Paul Leder), The Mighty Peking Man (1977, dir. Ho Meng Hua), and Yeti: Giant of the 20th Century (1977, dir. Gianfranco Parolini, aka Frank Kramer).

The funny part is how obvious it was that the films were made by people who didn’t have the faintest idea about context. It would be like me making a movie about coal mining, without doing any research, combining clichés I’d seen in movies about miners, or just plain ol’ making stuff up. This, of course, results in unintentional hilarity.

I recalled a video I did around 1990 that was “spaghetti” in how I took a song and tried to emulate it, though rather poorly. I had decided to rip off Kate Bush’s “The Sensual World” with a song for “Kate Shrub” called “The Emotional World”. It was all done very quickly with no planning: lyrics were improvised over a droning synth and drum track, while “Kate” danced through literal cardboard sets with bad snow effects in a single take (we were shooting several videos that day, so there was no time for retakes). Technically, such a song is what’s called a sound-alike, but I prefer “spaghetti pop”.

Watch on YouTube

I tried to transcribe the lyrics as best I could, but many of them are unintelligible, a combination of the poor quality of the video (filmed on VHS over thirty years ago!) and the fact I was using vocalese in some passages as a substitute for actual words:

An emotional world
You must tell her ...
And with an emotional world
You must open your heart to me

And dance in summer
And look and enjoy it

The sunlight
An emotional world, the sun can be enjoyed

And the pink flowers and the mountains
And the Howth Head and flesh ...

And then green mountain springs

With the peach fuzz and the moss
I can see and hear and dance
An emotional world
I can see how we can be so, you and me

I can see
I’m dancing
And the sun and the wind, we are passing through this ...

And see this ...
The emotional world

And dance each spring, ooh

... as the snow falls around me, the sea

The emotional world and the sea

$6M-Man invited me to go with him and a friend of his to The Oddities and Curiosities Expo at the Portland Convention Center. We thought it would be a good event to attend while stoned, so I took my tincture shortly before heading for the venue. The Expo featured vendors selling a variety of creepy and eerie goods and curios, such as weird little sculptures and dolls and actual stuffed animals. There was also a stage with sideshow type performers, such as a husband-and-wife sword swallowing act. While there, I had my usual trippy thoughts:

I suddenly felt very Daoist, or at least as Daoist as I could feel based on what little I understand about Daoism. It began with seeing the abstract sculptures in the shapes of animal heads. I could see the life in them, despite the fact they were obviously fake. And I began to see life everywhere, in objects and in people.

We’re all just wonderful little molecules and cells and atoms! The medium of air connects us all. My group of molecules moves through the molecules in the air, which swirl and circulate around me and everyone else. Everywhere in the world, every creature is breathing. Humans and animals breathe in air, then it reacts with our bodies and changes on its way out. In turn, the plants suck in the air, it reacts with their bodies, they exhale, and the cycle continues. Thus, we interact with each other in this way.

Some people may be better at manipulating their molecules and energies than others, either psychically or physically or emotionally. These ways might include body language, pheromones, the words one says or the manner in which one speaks, and so on. These manipulations reach out like ripples in a pond and communicate with everyone and everything around them, even if others are only responding to them on an unconscious level.

I remember thinking there was a lot of good eye-candy there, but then I realized everybody looked like eye-candy that day. Everyone was a movie star, everyone was beautiful, and there was so much joy there.

There were so many depictions of decay at the Expo, some realistic, some more metaphorical. Ordinarily I wouldn’t find this interesting at all—I’m more cyberpunk than goth—but suddenly I found it all fascinating. I know it’s a cliché to say this, but I saw that one doesn’t really die; one’s physical form just changes to some other form and continues.

One vendor was selling some art; my eye was immediately drawn to an illustration of a moth or butterfly suspended in the air, its wings disintegrating, so I bought it. At that time, my partner and I were getting ready to move to Japan for a few months. We were giving up our apartment in Portland and putting all our furniture and belongings into storage. We weren’t going to store any food aside from some canned goods, but I still didn’t want mice or rats gnawing at my clothes or books or documents. I read online that mothballs were a good way to keep such pests away, so I bought a few packs. I decided I would hang the picture of the moth in the storage space, and whimsically thought the irony of a moth in a space filled with mothballs would protect it from intruders, both animal and human.

After the Expo, $6M-Man’s friend went on their own way. $6M-Man asked if I felt like some kava. I thought he said java and assumed we were going somewhere for coffee, but no—we ended up at a place called the Nalu Kava Tea Lounge. Kava tasted like slightly bitter gourd but I liked it, and the more I drank, the more my tongue tingled with an almost spearmint sensation. We played Higher Thoughts for a while, then left.

We got some drive through food to go and went back to his place. I handed him my visor headset and showed him a couple of my tincture vids (specifically, number 4 and number 5), then decided it was time to head home. Bus service from $6M-Man’s place at that time of night is pretty spotty, so I ended up walking most of the way. Just as I reached the stop before my place, a bus showed up. Now, I could’ve just walked the rest of the way, but it was late, I was tired, I had already walked over two miles, so I hopped on the bus.

After I got off the bus, I was halfway to my apartment when I realized I didn’t have my moth with me. I hoped I had merely dropped it on the ground, but no—I must have left it on the bus. I cursed myself for not walking the rest of the way home, for if I had, I’d still have my moth. I filled out a lost-and-found report online with Trimet, but didn’t really expect I’d get my moth back. But two days later, Trimet contacted me and said they had found it! Hurrah!

The moth story doesn’t end there. A week or so later, we began moving stuff into the storage space. I taped the moth to the back wall so it could keep an eye on things. After nearly everything was moved in, there was no free space at all. Boxes were stacked nearly to the ceiling, and there was no room to walk. I took two of the mothball packs and tossed them over the stacks, hoping they would find their way to the floor and be relatively equally spaced apart.

I had never used mothballs before, and had no idea how much or little I should actually use. The instructions said not to open the packs, just to use them as is. However, the smell was overpowering, even from clear down the hallway in the storage space. I feared all our stuff would just reek forever, and worried the storage space management would object, even though there was nothing in the lease forbidding the use of mothballs. Unfortunately, since we’d be in Japan, it wasn’t like we could just come back and get the mothballs out if the management complained—they had to be removed now.

I began pulling out boxes and furniture, with no idea where the packets would be. I found one almost immediately—that would cut the stench by half at least, but that’s like celebrating the fact a fire destroyed only half your house. By now it was nearly impossible to pull out more boxes without either removing everything or having boxes topple down on me. I still had no idea where the other packet had fallen. But lo and behold, I finally saw it. It had somehow made its way down to the floor and under some furniture. I crawled through a very narrow gap and was able to pull it out. Hurrah again! I had to think, my moth must have had pretty damned powerful magic: not only did it find its way back to me after being left on the bus, it was powerful enough to drive out the mothballs. Surely such a creature was worthy of veneration. Not omnipotent like the Godcat but it definitely should be exalted, so I named it Gammoth. As I finish writing this, we are in Japan, so here’s hoping Gammoth is still protecting the space!

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A disclaimer—as Carl Sagan once said:

I was lying on my back in a friend’s living room idly examining the pattern of shadows on the ceiling cast by a potted plant (not cannabis!). I suddenly realized that I was examining an intricately detailed miniature Volkswagen, distinctly outlined by the shadows. I was very skeptical at this perception, and tried to find inconsistencies between Volkswagens and what I viewed on the ceiling. But it was all there, down to hubcaps, license plate, chrome, and even the small handle used for opening the trunk. I can remember another early visual experience with cannabis, in which I viewed a candle flame and discovered in the heart of the flame, standing with magnificent indifference, the black-hatted and -cloaked Spanish gentleman who appears on the label of the Sandeman sherry bottle. Looking at fires when high, by the way, especially through one of those prism kaleidoscopes which image their surroundings, is an extraordinarily moving and beautiful experience. I want to explain that at no time did I think these things ‘really’ were out there. I knew there was no Volkswagen on the ceiling and there was no Sandeman salamander man in the flame. I don’t feel any contradiction in these experiences. There’s a part of me making, creating the perceptions which in everyday life would be bizarre; there’s another part of me which is a kind of observer. Source

So no, I don’t honestly think an illustration of a moth is going to keep out rodents or intruders—I just enjoy the trippy thoughts I get. ;-)

I took the Yellow Line to the Delta Park/Vanport station and decided to walk to the Expo Center station, which goes through a nice little wooded area.

The road and the wooded area made me feel like I was in a 1960s French New Wave film. And for whatever reason that day, I felt like Michael Hutchence or Jim Morrison, full of confidence and a little swagger. And when you feel like that, you don’t walk, you mosey. And despite the swagger, I felt relaxed with nothing to prove to anyone, so I smiled beatifically at everyone I passed.

And then I wondered, where was this confident guy when I was in my 20s, or 30s, or 40s? Instead, at various times, I was a young man who was lonely, closeted, who didn’t think he was attractive in any way, who came across as shy, quiet, and uncertain. But I bet that confident person had been there all along, just waiting to express himself. Oh! What that young man might have become! And I wept a little for him and for lost opportunities.

But ya know what? I’m that person now. Even when I’m not stoned, I remember that feeling of confidence, and for that I’m grateful that I didn’t have to wait until I was in my 60s or 70s to realize this. “I am an astonishingly remarkable person,” I texted to myself.

Later that evening I listened to Eftsoons by Hal Russell and Mars William (1981). A real mind-blowing album, very experimental, with what sounded like random household objects used as percussion. There were moments when I could not tell the saxophone from a human voice, if there were any voices at all.

In mid-September, I was obliged to fly to Southern California for three nights, and I thought, “Since I’ve been experimenting with my tincture on buses and trains, how cool would it be to fly while stoned?”

However, while recreational cannabis is legal in both Oregon and California, it’s still against federal law, meaning you can’t transport it from one state to another, even if it’s legal in both states. I don’t know how strictly that law is enforced, but I didn’t want to take any chances, so I left my tincture at home. Instead, I searched online before I left and found a dispensary near my destination town. My plan was to buy some gummies that came in a ten-pack. Each gummy was a 10mg dose of THC, about 2/3 my usual dose. I figured I’d take a single gummy each night, just to relax before bedtime, then take two (about 1/3 higher than my usual dose) just before takeoff (and ditch the rest before going through security).

When I arrived at the dispensary, I was surprised how large the building was. I entered and found myself in a security vestibule. The guard scanned my ID and buzzed me through the door. Inside, it didn’t seem any larger than the average dispensary. There were the usual displays and cabinets and counters. But when I walked around one cabinet, I saw a wall of large windows on the far wall, through which was a field of cannabis! It was like something out of Silent Running (1972, dir. Douglas Trumbull). A young woman came up to me to see if I needed help. She was friendly, courteous, and knowledgeable, and I ended up choosing a pack of Kanha brand gummies.

My trip to So Cal, unfortunately, was filled with an inordinate amount of stress. To make matters worse, I didn’t care for the company of my host. My first evening there, I said I was very tired (which was true; I had been up since 3:30am) and wanted to turn in immediately after dinner. This was just to give me some time to myself. With all the stress just from the first day, I decided to take two gummies. The package promised it was “fast acting”, and it sure was. It hit me fast and with the higher than usual dose, hit me hard. Not a complaint.

Mostly I listened to music on my phone, including Holly Herndon, 4T Thieves, and Kaoru Mansour, and had some pretty wild visions and thoughts. I would just like to say at this point that when I have such visions, I don’t really think they’re real. It’s just what I’m imagining, as vivid as they are. Carl Sagan once wrote (under the pseudonym Mr. X):

I was lying on my back in a friend’s living room idly examining the pattern of shadows on the ceiling cast by a potted plant (not cannabis!). I suddenly realized that I was examining an intricately detailed miniature Volkswagen, distinctly outlined by the shadows. I was very skeptical at this perception, and tried to find inconsistencies between Volkswagens and what I viewed on the ceiling. But it was all there, down to hubcaps, license plate, chrome, and even the small handle used for opening the trunk. I can remember another early visual experience with cannabis, in which I viewed a candle flame and discovered in the heart of the flame, standing with magnificent indifference, the black-hatted and -cloaked Spanish gentleman who appears on the label of the Sandeman sherry bottle. Looking at fires when high, by the way, especially through one of those prism kaleidoscopes which image their surroundings, is an extraordinarily moving and beautiful experience. I want to explain that at no time did I think these things ‘really’ were out there. I knew there was no Volkswagen on the ceiling and there was no Sandeman salamander man in the flame. I don’t feel any contradiction in these experiences. There’s a part of me making, creating the perceptions which in everyday life would be bizarre; there’s another part of me which is a kind of observer. Source

I saw three dimensional arrays of perfectly aligned galaxies. I saw the Godcat sliced into a thousand disc-like cross sections, each one floating off in every direction and rotating on different axes and at different rates. I felt like Disney’s Alice in Wonderland again, falling through an infinite white universe, except populated not by geometric figures and equations like before, but by giant Fruit Loops.

Usually, I just keep my phone by my side in bed, but I was sleeping on a very narrow cot and worried the phone might drop to the floor. So, while listening to the music, I held it in my hand. I fancied the glow from its screen was a digital deity that watched over me while I was majorly tripping out. The Patron Saint of Good Trips, perhaps? I knew that as long as I held the phone in my hands, the deity would protect me, even as I floated through the space of a million brilliant stars.

I saw giant spidery walking sticks silhouetted black against blinding white floodlights. I felt like cannabis was a gift of nature, essential for humanity, like food and air and water. The meta-pine manifests itself in cannabis, a connection ancient humanity once had that put us in a state of emotional and spiritual harmony, and that it was right and good. But eventually the powers that be decided it was sinful and immoral and wicked, and humanity lost this valuable metaphysical connection. I was in symbiosis with the deity of my phone, and thus I was a conduit between the meta-pine (flora) and the metals in my phone.

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The next evening, I took two more. I listened to a little music, but was fascinated by the sounds of my room: the hum of the air conditioning, which caused the window blinds to rattle delicately, like the sound of a far-off woodpecker. There was the ticking of the clock, and a very faint sound of someone street racing in the distance.

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Finally, it was time to go home. I returned my rental car, then took two more gummies just before proceeding through security.

I like being in airports (stoned or not). They seem utopian, usually with very modern buildings, clean, pristine, sometimes futuristically antiseptic. The various counters often had huge screens behind them, glowing with information. And plenty of PA announcements, which I also like.

While waiting to board, I watched another episode of Are You Being Served? (“Shoulder to Shoulder”, 1975, dir. Ray Butt). The poor auto-generated captioning resulted in a few good laughs. “Cheeky devil” became “Chiqui Death”, which sounds like a great drag name. When Mrs. Slocombe said, “I think I’ll go and get myself a coffee.” it was captioned as “I think I’ll go and get myself a coffin.” I thought it would be interesting to take the script from an episode of Are You Being Served? and have someone translate it into Japanese, but tell them to localize it to fit modern Japanese culture and customs. Then, take the results and give it to someone else, telling them it’s a traditional Japanese play and ask them to translate it into English, and again, localize it for modern Western culture and customs. Then, redub the episode of Served? with the “new” script. With a show so full of double entendres and very British idiomatic speech, the results ought to be interesting. Alas, my own Japanese skills are too poor to attempt such a thing.

Some “monumentally funny” thoughts and incidents occurred:

I’ve always detested the term “pre-boarding” when used to mean “early boarding”. Pre-boarding to me just means before anyone boards. So ... what happens to the first guy in line when they say passengers can pre-board? Does he get stuck in some kind of temporal limbo? A man made an announcement asking a passenger to return to security for a lost item. He sounded like a drunken James Earl Jones, reading something by Edgar Allen Poe, painfully aware he might win an Oscar for his performance. I wish I had caught it in time to record it on my phone for sampling.

Soon we boarded the plane, and more weirdness ensued on the flight.

There was a really weird noise while we were waiting on the runway. No idea what it was, but it sounded like a vocoder haunted by Enya ... “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh ...” A woman sitting a few rows ahead of me was fiddling with her air vent controls, and every time she made an adjustment, the engines would make a funny noise. I didn’t realize the flight engineer was sitting in the cabin with we passengers! The woman across the aisle had her cell lying face down on her tray table. The phone had one of those little suction cup thingies (like a Popsocket) on the back, but at first glance I thought it was a really tiny cup off tea! A woman somewhere behind me was speaking Chinese with such pronounced tones, it sounded liked she was singing “The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down”. It was probably the time dilation I usually experience while stoned, but our takeoff seemed like the longest one ever. I fancied we were just going to drive all the way to Portland, which would be a funny sight—a plane going 500mph down the freeway, obliterating or knocking aside everything in its path: trees, bridges, overpasses, cars, and everyone running in terror like it’s Godzilla. But if something that fast ran you down, you probably wouldn’t see it coming, and you wouldn’t know what hit you. Kinda like Nomad! A woman and her seventeen children occupied the row behind me. “Oh, great,” I thought, “I get to sit in front of The Brady Bunch”. Then the theme song got into my head, but similar to when I was rearranging lines of nursery rhymes, my brain rearranged the lyrics, which of course, I found immeasurably funny: Here’s the story of a lovely lady Who was busy with three boys of his own All of them had hair of gold, like their mother Yet they were all alone Here’s the story of a man named Brady Who was bringing up three very lovely girls They were four men, living all together The youngest one in curls One of the Brady kids began kicking my seat. I heard his mother say, “Don’t do that, some people don’t like it,” and he stopped. Some people? Is there any one who actually likes it? Maybe she was referring to those into BDSM humiliation, who would probably enjoy that. Nice the mother is open to alternate lifestyles!

Being stoned on a plane is quite different from being stoned on a bus or train. It’s quieter, with no outside noises, so conversations really stand out. Most people were speaking in very hushed tones, just ordinary, quiet dialogue. No shouting, no braying. And ya know, I thought, life is pretty damned amazing. I was in a big metal box, soaring high in the air, using something the size of a wallet to watch movies and create art. I watched movies and created art in my teens, just not in such a high tech fashion. I guess I’m just a higher (no pun intended) tech teen now.