More weirdness in a serious light:)

[Michaelaw]

I’m going to preface this post with an “I’m not damaged, I can't be” sort of reasoning path. I’m an Audiovisual technician, no greatness required to fill that slot but it helps to have a good aptitude for things mechanical, fairly good understanding of signal flow and a good ability to troubleshoot and reason. The people who hire me consistently throw me into big halls full of high tech gear and nervous clients whom I’ve never met before. My introduction usually goes something like this “This is mike, he’ll be your tech tonight, tell him what you need and he’ll make it go!” From that moment on, as familiar faces clear the room, I am alone with strangers, faces, hard core corporate types with definite agendas who through introduction have at least a modicum of faith in my abilities. IBM, Microsoft, big banking, massive property management companies, major airlines, no matter who, I have to make them trust me and my ability to help them convey their message to their shareholders, prospective clients or internal management as in the case of large seminars with a seamless delivery of events in the tech world. I must have the ability to shape shift to gain their trust as in reality I’m just another artsy fartsy beer drinking yahoo with far fetched ideas with regards to the corporate world and its shenanigans! The fact that I’m heavily booked must somehow attest to my ability to become a corporately sympathetic, leave my personal life back there in the bag kind of guy and don the universal plan of the sane world successfully. Now to the meat keeping the aforementioned in mind! As a younger guy, moons ago, I did copious amount of drugs. Mushrooms, LSD…Name a mind altering drug and I’ve done it. That’s not a flag waiving thing , it just coincides with the era I grew up in. LSD was one of my favorites, not for the colors or hallucinations but for the ability it had to give insight and separation for me with regards to what we are, and what we can be, closely aligned with our perceptions of reality! Right out of the gate I don’t condone the use of this drug to anyone. The reason for that logic is kind of ´”Yodian”. “Luke: What's in there?
Yoda: Only what you take with you.”
Without doubt, whatever issues you have with regards to your personal assessment of yourself will be amplified, and not always in a good way when you begin to peak on this drug. Not good eating for those with issues! Part two…My perceived drug induced experiences. I remember clearly having a hellish dose of bronchitis, couldn’t push myself physically at all without someone calling 911 for fear I was about to die. After consuming LSD with a friend at a party, some of us decided we would have a race from the ground to the top of a bank of pine trees in the back forty. I climbed like a demon sixty feet in the air, in the dark, midnight and won the race with not one coughing outburst. The next day my condition was all but cleared! Picking apples years ago on a farm in Kelowna, we dropped acid (LSD) on our day off. Tree climbing again out in the orchard, I was climbing and jumping tree to tree much like a monkey without even the consideration that I would misjudge the span between branches. From branches fifteen feet in the air, I was leaping distances of up to twelve feet to other trees and branches. It never once crossed my mind that I couldn’t do it or what the consequences would be if my judgment was off…In my being, I knew it wasn’t. The next day, I went back to the same trees to attempt a repeat performance and was not able to jump more than six feet and even then it was to close to catastrophe. Once while camping with friends we consumed this dastardly drug and played tag in thick brush at 2am in overcast conditions…No moon, only blackness! We all remarked the following day how strange it was that we could run in total darkness at full speed and see the terrain, tree falls, trees, cliff edges…Our senses were heightened to near daylight conditions. I repeated this with no enhancement a while later and was like an old man, blind with a cane. A bunch of us were camping again when I was seventeen at a cabin forty miles from the nearest house, again we were deep in the bowels of a collective LSD trip. One of our dear friends was late to the party. He rode a beat-up 350 Yamaha motorcycle that had a distinctive sound because it backfired consistently on every shift. We all heard him coming a full hour before he arrived. It wasn’t just the backfires we heard but every nuance of the motorcycles sound as we’d come to know it over time. At one point the bike noise stopped for some ten minutes, we laughed and thought we were losing it but then it started up again and we heard it until his arrival. We related this to him when he got to the party including the part where we stopped hearing him and thought we were nuts. “I had to stop for gas at the old store he said…That store was right by the last house forty miles back from the cabin. Lastly an epiphany of sorts for me using the same drug, though this is subjective. Standing down by the waterfront it occurred to me that of course we are one with the universe and all it contains. To me it was a matter of density. I am a dense collection of atoms, beyond me is a lesser density…Air! Beyond the air is that three hundred foot building four hundred meters to the south. There is no definitive border between me and that object. Where I end as an object, air begins and that same air runs right into that building. There are no borders, no barrier saying Michael stops here and then air takes over nor one declaring the end of air and the beginning of a building. Between myself and that building is only different densities of matter all fused together without definitive borders, just different densities, of course we are one and one can carry that argument toward the edges of the known universe, the outer rim of the Big Bang! The walls of separation are non existent, just differing densities of matter but ultimately one uniform collection of matter! Out on a limb with this post I know but I don’t pretend to be anything other than me

[jjeling]

Thank you much. I quite enjoyed this. Good read. It was some years ago, but it almost sounds like yesterday. Hopefully things like to do not constantly nag you. That could be its own story.

[Iguanasan]

Interesting story. I'm certainly glad you survived. Sounds like it could have gone either way for a while there.