Nomad Codes

seemed closer to the surface, and I don’t think it’s a matter of my own nostalgia. Raves, which restage the Neopagan commingling of a Woodstock I never saw in venues resembling the space stations I never will, are only the greatest and most media-friendly example of youth culture’s desire to tune into trippy frequencies. There are also rappers talking hemp conspiracy theories and crafting stoned-out beats and rhymes, cyber-slackers building virtual worlds, prog rockers and jocks dancing in the dust at Lollapalooza. And it’s not just the kids. If you don’t see a connection between brokerage firms’ increasing reliance on virtual reality representations of stock data and the Economis ’s pro-legalization cover story, you probably didn’t smoke enough pot in high school.
    Drugs are like sexual pleasures: experimentation is a prerequisite for judgment. For each of us, certain drugs will become allies, enemies, passing acquaintances—but first they must be encountered, knee-deep in the mud of personal history. Though the timing of my early encounters now seems a bit out-of-hand, the place was certainly more than appropriate: coastal California. As a kid, I grew up in Del Mar—the mellow, upwardly mobile surf town north of San Diego name-dropped in “Surfing, U.S.A.” Just before I entered junior high, my family moved inland to Rancho Santa Fe—a wealthy and conservative realm of citrus groves, migrant Mexican workers, and geriatrics in golf carts. Stone-cold Reagan country, and me and Senzo Joe would escape into the weed, smoking out in so many lemon groves that the sharp tang of citrus peels still conjures up bud.
    Pot led me into a tangible world of bubbling micro-perceptions, haunted winds, and hilarious malformations of the data-stream. But pot also gave me something that has stuck with me far longer than the urge to bake my brain: a love of slippage, founded in the realization that altering perception alters the claims reality makes on you. The various social agendas of parents, teachers, and the ghost of God could be sidestepped—not only by sullen monosyllables and the worship of unwholesome heavy-metal guitarists but by tinkering with consciousness itself. What greater rebellion than rewiring one’s experience of the world?
    Parents have reason for concern. At thirteen, identity is a spell woven from a bursting body, ego defenses and world views that have yet to congeal, and the prepubescent power of fantasy lurking just below the surface. That’s why kids can travel so far into their headphones, role-playing games, pop star posters, and beat-up copies of The Necronomicon . Toss in a psychedelic—and let no one tell you that good weed cannot be a psychedelic—and the warp gets deep. Pot lets you see dragons in the clouds again.
    I know, because I saw a lot of stuff, zoning out in that bedroom where every surface was covered with some numinous image: goatgods, spaceships, mandalas, Penthouse pin-ups, Jesus, Jimmy Page. In that psychic house of cards, I jury-rigged my mind, teaching myself to soar off a single hit of scraped resin, the reek cloaked by blackberry incense on my hodgepodge altar crowned by a concrete Buddha. He was a birthday gift from Senzo Joe, stolen from someone’s lawn, and once I swear he slyly peeled back his ponderous eyelids and stared me down.
    The ominous intensity of that gaze, conjured with so little fuel, could be evidence of the dangers mind-altering drugs pose for kids. But it’s difficult for big folk to make judgments about teens without projecting their own foibles and fears onto creatures who live in a completely different world—a zone that is far more complicated than a simple stage between childhood and that elusive (and highly debatable) state called maturity. The pliable subjectivities, imaginative resourcefulness, rebellious courage, cliquishness, and cultural verve that define teens also give them powerful tools and contexts for experiencing drugs, tools that most adults lack. It’s no accident that many kids start taking drugs at about the same age when children in traditional societies are tossed into some terrifying rite of passage, often involving a freaked-out combination of blood, darkness, self-sufficiency, and secrets. For better or worse, acid, ’shrooms, and massive bongloads now perform this rite, leaving marks that are both scars and the deep patterns of change.
    Unfortunately, dog-eared copies of Castaneda or a snide older sibling is