Nomad Codes

needle or a bottle on all those caps around town. It’s a leaf.

    We drank loads too, almost as much for the sport of keg crashing as for the sloshy slapstick philosophizing it produced. And weed itself often devolved into a kind of beer. But psychedelics were always our Grand Guignol of phantasmic ecstasy. LSD turns the mind into a kind of silly putty, lifting images from a comic-book world and then twisting them alternately into hilarious caricatures or resonant archetypes. Kids can dig this, and certainly can ride with it better than most adults, who find the world unstable enough as it is. Because most of us were still cushioned in our parents’ homes, my friends and I had a baseline security that allowed us to enter LSD’s ontological house of mirrors with the proper plasticity. Like running hell-bent down the slippery rocks of a steep river bank, tripping makes for a certain balance in flux, an internal momentum easier for kids to achieve than their more brittle future selves.
    We knew from Leary and Alpert the importance of set and setting, advice we both followed and blatantly ignored. Outdoor Dead shows were a cross between astral planes and romper rooms, but North County’s unspoiled zones were the greatest backdrops. The summer we were gobbling all of Squiggles’s white blotter, we’d time our doses to hit at sunset. We’d kick back on the coppery cliffs of Red Rocks beneath a hunchbacked pine and watch the sun melt into an immense, resplendent sea. The sky struck the total chord of the spectrum, from the crimson lump of the slipping orb through the violet haze of the canopy above. And to the east lay the distinct boundary where dusk stopped and evening began to sketch the uncertain hieroglyphs of the stars.
    And then we’d plunge, in the aimless and reckless quest for the silliest of grails (a party, pot, a parent-free abode), arms open to the banal, tinny surface of suburban culture. Perhaps I became an apocalyptic psychonaut the night I entered a 7-11 with the knee-shaking awe of a UFO abductee, or learned to listen for the cosmic giggle in the babble of popular culture the night Weffles and I, toasted on some nameless blotter, visited Tuddy’s downbeat seaside motel room. The place smelled like a cave, the carpet was stained with sticky grime, and Tuddy, an outpatient from a mental ward and one of the good-natured party animals we called aardvarks, was blotto. A half-empty case of Henry’s or Mickey’s or some other lousy lager sat on the formica table. We murmured weird communications, attempting to track the myriad and ridiculous paths other aardvarks had taken that night. Like the eye of a djinn, a thirteen-inch black-and-white TV stared down at us from the corner of the ceiling. It was showing Animal Crackers . Groucho took measure of our squalid scene, raised an eyebrow, and split the world apart with a wisecrack of gutter satori, as if someone had fished a smelly copy of Mad from a dumpster and folded it into a delicate origami swan that instantly took to wing, singing the elusive song of the psychedelic ineffable: “Hello, I must be going ...”
    It doesn’t really matter what Groucho said. Acid doesn’t give you truths; it builds machines that push the envelope of perception. Whatever revelations came to me then have dissolved like skywriting. All I really know is that those few years saddled me with a faith in the redemptive potential of the imagination which, however flat, stale, and unprofitable the world seems to me now, I cannot for the life of me shake.

    Years ago, the weed and I pretty much parted ways. Some folks claim that pot chills them out, but in my brain it produces a bubbling, crackling connection-machine that generally sinks into the mire. Trivial objects, words, and glances stitch together webs of deep and intense meaning that uncomfortably thicken—one time a Greek salad in New Haven set off a rumination on the flows of Western history that overwhelmed my puny mind like a tidal wave. Pot makes a lot of people uncomfortably paranoid, in part because it produces enough connections to elicit the subterranean patterns of the conspiracy theorist, while not rewiring the self a la five grams of Psilocybe cubensis . Whether or not the sense that everything fits together is perceived as a holistic liberation or a dire trap depends a lot on how tightly you are clinging to your frame of mind.
    For all their gifts, drugs create too many problematic relations: to their own