Monday, February 06, 2006

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

I have never once experimented with psychedelic drugs. It’s all very well saying they produce an “expanded state of consciousness”, but what’s wrong with my current state? A groovy ape like me doesn’t need artificial substances to be aware of my place in the cosmos. I marvel in awe at the fiery tropical sunsets; I gaze in spiritual contentment at the starry night sky; I gasp in wonder at water-droplets falling from leaves; I sigh in empathy with crawling insects (before I eat them).

I see termites hatch
I watch them grow
They’ll taste much better
Than they’ll ever know
And I think to myself: what a wonderful world!

Yessir, I’m a pretty cool gorilla who’s totally at one with creation. My mental state is a-okay without any of your LSD or magic toadstools – and if it ain’t broken, I don’t fix it.

I won’t deny that we gorillas use natural remedies to cure our ailments, though. There’s a fungus that grows on the bark of the Uapaca tree which is excellent for getting the bowels moving if you’ve been eating too many yams. It also produces the most pleasing side-effects. I once took some after feeling a bit constipated, and I remember floating upwards until I had a birds-eye view of the neighbourhood. It gave me a terrific vantage point to see what the cheeky monkeys were doing, although their fur was an unusual colour that day. I also saw a purple elephant having sex with a rhino, which is the kind of rare jungle event that would make a human zoologist cream his jeans. It’s a pity I didn’t have a camcorder on me. But I’ve said enough to demonstrate the wholesome nature of our jungle medicines. Your so-called “acid trips” mean nothing to an ape who enjoys such simple pleasures.

The guru of the psychedelic movement was an eccentric human called Dr Timothy Leary. It seems he was a well-respected professor until he ate some stuff that made him realise he was living the life of a soulless robot. Whereupon he embarked on a mission to persuade the human race to blow its collective mind with regular doses of LSD, in order to bring forth a new age of hedonism, space travel and loud shirts. “Turn on, tune in, drop out” was his famous slogan, heard by millions of impressionable college students. Most of them seemed to react by turning up, getting laid and passing out.

But I give Dr Leary credit for the manner of his death. After contracting a terminal illness, he rashly made a will leaving his head to a cabal of mad scientists, who wanted to freeze it and bring it back to life in the future. But as Dr Leary neared death, he realised that being resuscitated as a talking head by those white-coated fiends would be a fate worse than oblivion. So he amended his will to specify that his body should be cremated and that any scientist approaching it with a hacksaw should be tarred, feathered and run out of town by the local posse. As an ironic final gesture, he spent his last days on Earth with his head resting next to the bosom of a buxom nurse, which was a far better place for it than the deep freeze.


Comments:
I spent a lot of my youth trollied off my face on LSD. My friend and I used to synchronize our watches, pop a miroflint at out respective jobs and then neet up half an hour later, by which case we'd be tittering and our pupils huge.
It backfired once when my boss-toady little guttersnipe- decided to keep me back for a while to talk to me about my 'attitude' to the job, by the time he'd finished lecturing me I was in fits. I couldn't talk because I was sure my tongue would unravel out of my mouth and slide down my chin and anyway, I was not sure which head I should be paying attention to. Then I fell down imaginary steps on the way out and grazed my shin. Then I got on my bike a cycled off to meet my friend who was walking around the Stephen's Green unsure of which side to get off on as all the railings looked the same. It took us half an hour to find a way off and by then we had collapsed numerous times in giggles. I think I lost the bike.
Terrific fun.
But you grow out of it, dontcha?
 
Countless.
And I was champion at remebering what we were talking about. Eleven of us could be sitting around a table and after a few minutes conversation someone would say 'What are we talking about again? How did we end up talking about this?' And I-and only I- would be able to trace the story right back to the original comment-to the awe of my equally smooched buddies. Then I would drink a bottle of Bud and grin stupidly at tracers for half an hour until my services were required again.
 
The probem with LSD, magic mushrooms and the like is they exaggerate your emotions to the extreme, while removing the ability to be rational.

If you find something funny, it will be the funniest thing in your entire life. This kind of fun means you'll enjoy doing it regularly until you have a bad trip. Because if you're tripping and something triggers you to feel fear, then it will be the most terrifying experience of your life. And I don't want another of those thank you very much.
 
The Day After is what put me off drugs for life. That vile hollow tinny feeling you carry around because you haven't slept since Friday night and your jaw hurts and you've bitten the inside of your cheek to shite.
That and just plain old getting older. These days I like to remain as one with my body and not feel homicidal on a Wednesday.
Anyway I'm into the gym and healthy eating, so it just wouldn't wash would it?
 
No gorilla in the wild should need have recourse to hallucinogenic drugs - at least not when there's so much fermenting fruit littering the forest floor.

If you live in Birmingham, on the other hand, who can blame you?
 
Not just getting older, FMC, but being a parent. Can you imagine trying to deal with a dirty nappy while tripping? Doesn't bear thinking about.
 
I don't know if it's a flashback or not, but that jacket he's wearing in the picture is strobing something hellish.
 
My cat used to love an After Eight mint, so we'd give her one at dinner parties. She'd attempt to extract it from the envelope with her paws, which is not easy if you're a cat, and then when it was out, she would lie down with her chin on it and dribble into it and it would melt all over her neck. It was the funniest sight.

When Nestlé's bought After Eights they took the catmint out and it doesn't work any more.

Killjoys.
 
Am I misremembering or did Aldous Huxley pre-date Leary? It's a bit of a purple haze. The one time I was simply hysterical with laughter was after being given 'laughing gas', the first time I fractured my leg. It was almost worth the agony.
 
Hello Aunty,

Your comment would have been very helpful in an earlier post called 'Speeding dating by smell'. It's linked on the right. A certain young lady posed an interesting question regarding the behaviour of her cat. I won't mention the young lady's name because frankly she scares me.
 
We all seem to have survived the Phsychedelics relatively unscathed,except for two or three of my voices who had bad trips and still get flashbacks,or so they tell me.
 
A big strong boy gorilla scared of me? Come on GB, you're supposed to protect us females! Leary's buxom nurse wasn't me, btw!
 
The wise simian is right on the money--who needs chemical shit when you can have a terrific time with just a couple glasses of red wine and a nice woman to your side?

But surely, GB, the hypothetical witness to your vision of elephantorhynophilia must be a female zoologist. No matter what her profession, creaming her jeans is a vision we can all endorse--but a male zoologist creaming HIS jeans is likely to repel many a dedicated reader of your blog.

As to writers who 'experimented' with lysergic acid and similar concoctions, I should mention another one, now that someone brought up Huxley. It was Arthur Koestler, a very excentric, fascinating fellow, who wrote anti-Communist novels, and also rehabilitated Kepler against that impostor Galileo. Some time in the 1960s he got into this 'mind-expanding' stuff (I use the quotes since a good deal of those who practice it don't have a mind to begin with; but I digress). The trouble was, Koestler would get so stoned, that he'd always forget to put his trans-sensorial 'visions' on paper, later to be used as literary material. Except for one time, when he managed to remember, in a drugged mist, to write down what he saw.

On the next day, when he came to, he had a look at what he had jotted down the night before. All he had gotten in the way of artistic insight from LSD was this: "The banana is big, but the skin is even bigger."

--Desargues
 
Is the 27 fellow off his medication again? I thought guys like him aren't allowed to leave their mother's basement--except for Sunday morning, to go to the local megachurch.

Obviously I was wrong.
 
I'm going to leave 0.27eponymous dickhead's last comment to stand, because at least he's written some mildly goofy crap about the subject of the post. He may not be so lucky with any more drivel he puts up.
 
You know of course who he is, I assume, GB? Check out Vaporise Barney for his unmasking.
 
I do now! I never realised SafeT was so bored. Our fault, I suppose.
 
Be nice to 27, he's got a terminal cancer, and isn't expected to live much longer...
 
He does?
 
'Now that someone brought up huxley' Someone is me. Pat or PI. Take your pick.
 
Mr Gorilla Bananas, as always your page attracts the best.

I have added pi and leilouta to the REPUBLIC.

See pi's 1946, leilouta's red flags with white, and you'll agree. Top notch foraging. (two r's?).

I have declared capetorio a republic by wiping all the blogging "royal family" from it. Fuckbaga!
 
Dr Maroon: you are the Alan Whicker of the blogosphere. I'll try to keep up with developments.
 
Leilouta:He was.
 
I've only ever done weed. That's enough. Out of body experinces would probably just cause me to get depressed, seeing my body from a different angle?
 
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