APRIL 29 2023

I’m sitting here sick as fuck surrounded by clumps of snot filled hand towels, empty vegan protein smoothie bottles, unpacked boxes, dirty laundry, a top sheet that made it’s way down to the foot of my bed and other blankets on the floor next to my bed that I can use as second skins if I get up to pee or make tea, cause every time I leave the cocoon of covers I’ve been burrowed in for the past 2 days I get intense chills and my head starts throbbing. My sweat has been soaking through layers of blankets and I’ve slept off and on for about 16 hours.

It’s so rare that I get sick and I was reading about how sickness is a powerful way of rejuvenating our cells and giving our bodies deep rest, so I’m just marinating in it and accepting how pukey and sickly I am until I feel like I can go out again. Thankfully, a friend of mine was able to bring me some smoothies and crackers yesterday cause I felt like I was going to blow chunks and wasn’t keeping food down very well.

It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that I got sick as I went to Vancouver this week and saw Carcass and Municipal Waste and was drinking (I only had 2 drinks and switched to soda water when I remembered I was the DD, but that was still a lot for someone who almost never drinks).  Then I decided to mosh in a pit full of flailing, stinking metal heads; exchanging sweat, spittle and microorganisms. After the show I ended up at a Granville st. bar and we had a metal head dance party to house music that lasted until last call.

Before the show I met up with my friend Bunny and we hadn’t seen each other for a long time.  Was it 7 years or 3 years?  More like maybe 4 or 5.  Time has become such a mirage.  She was letting me know what was up with some of our mutual friends and I was really saddened to hear about a friend of ours, Steve, passing away.  He was more known in the Montreal punk scene but he lived in Vancouver for a while, sleeping on the floor in Bunny's room or out on her little balcony. Steve and I were both older than most of the other punks we were hanging out with and he was also a huge fan of 70’s punk rock. He was super fun to party with and stood out as a sincere and awesome human who was always respectful towards women.

Knowing he wasn’t in a good place when he decided to leave this realm is deeply upsetting and I’m glad that I was going to see a metal show that evening and was able to get out a lot of the fucked up energy I was feeling. I feel really bad for Bunny, as they were super close :(

On the positive side of things, another friend of mine who was very long time opiate user has been clean for a year and so that was really awesome to hear.


Good times:

**

I'm getting a chance to finish a book I picked up recently called The True Light of Darkness written by an Albertan psychonaut about navigating the darker aspects of the psychedelic experience.

I started using psychedelics in my early teens and they became a replacement for alcohol when I started to realize how much damage alcoholism was causing in my family. I was mostly using LSD, though was also taking some mushrooms and weed, and most of the time I had great trips - and the forests, waterfalls and generally chill vibe of Nelson BC, where I lived during my formative years, was a perfect back drop for those experiences. I had two friends who I would hang out with a lot and take acid with and we did a lot of fun and creative things together like making short films and leaving mock police body impressions in chalk at locals churches.

From the beginning there were some darker aspects to my trips, like seeing the faces of the Beatles in a poster in my friends' room morph into demons, and sometimes seeing my own face as something akin to the demon possessed Regan from the Exorcist when I would look into the mirror. I also became hyper aware of the manipulative nature of many humans, especially a lot of the people in Nelson who were wrapped up in what I saw as a very false and superficial version of spiritual awareness. I can still recall one incident where an older man (he was probably in his late 20's, but that seemed really old to me when I was 13 haha) was grilling me about my astrological sign.  He carried himself with an air of arrogance and superiority and seemed to think that he was someone I should be respecting and admiring, and he was deeply embedded in the alternative scene in Nelson. I responded to him very defensively and wouldn't give him a lot of information and the situation inspired me to build up better boundaries around myself. That same night I was also turned on to two bands that I became an instant fan of:  Coil and My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult.  Up until that point I had been obsessed with the alternative records of my parent's era like early Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa and David Bowie - and then I started to get into a lot of alternative bands from the 80's and 90's.  Oh and I also had a big phase of listening to artists like Tiffany, Debbie Gibson, New Kids on the Block and Vanilla Ice, don't want to forget about that!

During many of my psychedelic experiences I became very aware of how alienated I felt from others and I would often feel totally overwhelmed in social situations and would seek out solitude, usually in nature somewhere. I still find in interesting that I never once saw any bears or cougars during my reckless forest adventures.

One time while high on mushrooms lying in the forest by myself away from the hubbub at an outdoor music I felt an entire world of fairies and mushrooms grow around me as I tripped out for many hours (this was a time when taking 3.5 grams was pretty standard for a trip). I would sometimes hear packs of coyotes in the distance but they never came near me.

At one point after taking a few hits of acid I had a mini psychotic break and felt like my brain was being invaded by extraterrestrials and there was an intense throbbing metallic noise that pierced into my skull for many many hours. I was walking up the street with my two friends and collapsed onto the ground and started freaking out. They didn't know how to deal with it and I ended up walking home by myself and then lying in bed for many hours, knowing I shattered my psyche in a deep way. For weeks afterwards I was deeply drawn inward and felt extremely depressed and anxious.

I had also experienced a brief bout of psychosis a few years earlier when I woke up in the middle of the night to my mom being violently abused by her partner. This had been going on for 7 or 8 years (winding her up in the hospital twice) and by that time and I had had enough - so I stormed downstairs and forced her long-time douche bag boyfriend to leave. The intensity of having to do that left me traumatized and I remember being hunched into a shell-like shape for a long time screaming, crying and shaking and feeling so overwhelmed that I started detaching from my body. There were other experiences from my early childhood where I would casually start hallucinating or detaching from my body, and sometimes I would wish myself into nonexistence - which would be followed by a feeling of subtle departicularization and a reprieve from my frayed nervous system.

One time I was walking down a very steep hill that led from our house to downtown and I could see a bright crescent moon shining over my head. At that point I was feeling even more isolated and had been ousted from my friend group for reasons I still don't understand (some of those girls later apologized to me, so it was likely just them being catty bully girls). I stared up at the moon for a long time and I came to recognize that to be on a spiritual path means going through darkness.

I tried taking LSD one more time in the mid-90's when I was in Vancouver seeing the Pink Floyd laser light show at the planetarium. I had another profoundly negative experience that was heightened by being in the city and surrounded by so much infrastructure, like the Skytrain and towering sky scrapers that blocked out the sky.

When I experienced a full blown psychotic break and ended up in the hospital for a month in my late 20's, my first thought was that I was having acid flashbacks, and so much of what I experienced during that period of psychosis was similar to the psychedelic experiences I'd had in my early teens. And it was interesting that the author of The True Light of Darkness referenced the film the Altered States, as so much of what I experienced when I was in solitary confinement for 3 days reminded me of the kinds of experiences the main character in Altered States was having throughout the film.

It's been over 13 years since I went through that intense psychological rite of passage and it's not something that I've been able to write about yet, as I've spent all of my energy since that time trying to come out of psychosis and get more grounded - and it's been really tough.

I've been healing from my mental and spiritual health issues without the use of any kind of Western prescribed medications and I've made significant changes to my diet and lifestyle. In the years following my psychosis I stopped using hard drugs and cut my alcohol consumption down to a few times a year. I used marijuana as a gateway out of harder drugs and then stopped using anything but CBD. I spend a lot of time alone (sometimes too much) and a lot of time in nature.

I also realized that so much of what I experienced psychologically is interconnected to society as a whole, and I've I've found myself inspired to join frontline activist movements (mainly Indigenous led) that are addressing the profound social and environmental problems of humanity.

When I was at Adaitsx Fairy Creek having breakfast one morning there were about 5 of us standing around randomly, and one of the people there started talking about all of his experiences going through the mental health system, and then the rest of us all perked up and were like me too. Our mental breakdowns had brought us all to places in our lives where we could no longer passively accept the world as it is and we were compelled to be a part of radical changes.