Despite my tenure in hip communities in both Greenwich Village and the back side of Boston’s Beacon Hill, my drug culture participation was pretty limited. Even in that brief period of time when I purported to be a “stone head,” I was largely “clean”, it was a pose.
In fact, it turned out that I really did not like the disconnected feeling that I got. Just a bit of a tune-up on weed while sitting with friends was social. But solitary stuff was not my thing. Experiment, play around a bit, but take a deep dive in, no, no, no, no! So, times in which I questioned reality mostly had to do with unaltered emotional states.
Believe me, being on the road was trippy enough without chemical assistance. What do you do when it’s past midnight, there’s been no rides for two hours, you’re hungry, tired, and footsore? You walk. No moon, just the quiet rustling of the leaves in the wood. Just you alone, inside your head.
Once in a while, you hear the distant sound of a car, you stop, but no one wants to stop this time of night for a chancy bum on the side of the road. There gets to be a certain rhythm to your feet on the road surface, the bump of your guitar case against your leg, and the chafe of the backpack. Your mind starts to disconnect, and you find that you’re wading into a huge pool of memory. That enormous catchment basin of discarded thought.
After a while, which memory, alternative remembrance, or possible reality starts lining up like the doors on some sort of flaky game show…Choose what’s behind door number one. Or maybe two. Damn, not three – look at what’s oozing from below it! It’s a game you’re playing. Sure. But as the miles pile on, the clear certainty fades. Did Cheryl actually dump you or was it the crappy job that set up this nocturnal expedition to nowhere. When dawn came, where would I be? Now you have no external reinforcements – no pocket radio blaring out the top forty hits of the week, and no company to break the revery. Just the scrape of greasy calf skin D-ring boots on gravel. the chafe of the pack and the bump of the guitar case.
After a span of time without measure, you spot the faintest gleam of pre-dawn on the horizon. A pickup truck slows down, then stops. You are going wherever he is. You just need to get out of here, into the daylight, have some coffee and conversation, and on to your destination.
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By the time I hit the road in 78- my drug use was already well established- you are so lucky to have escaped that underbelly of the culture!
I was fortunate in who I fell in with. They were indulgent, but cautious. It could have very easily turned out otherwise. We were surrounded by “heads” of all stripes.
When I was about 13, I went with my dad to the VA hospital for his check up on the progress of his MS. On the drive home he made me promise I’d never do anything to my mind. “If you have your mind, you can still work, MAK, even if your body goes.” He read everything and I’m sure he knew about Timothy Leary’s and Aldous Huxley’s experiments with psychotropic drugs. You can be sure I made that promise though I didn’t understand — at the time — everything behind it.
That said… I liked old-school weed but not the highly engineered stuff that exists now. I experimented with coke a couple of times in the 70s but I hated it. Peyote made me puke so that was a non-starter. The best high I have ever gotten in my life is out in nature for hours and hours wandering. You describe something like that in your post; when you’re walking along and your mind does what it does. Anyway, I already have no idea what’s going on without enhancing that. 😜
I’m with you. I’d never touch the modern stuff. drifting off in front of the fire is about my speed these days, the cats and dog join me, and we’re all high.
We were lucky to grow up in the times we did.
Indeed!