Ketamine

There is probably a million among none of you who remember that summer when I was bringing vials of Ketamine to anyone who’d have them. Just jam a milligram into a muscle and there you were, somewhere else, experiencing the life of a butterfly or realizing what some Hindu deity did in another dimension, something dirty smelling like dirt and the essence of pure light. A life of bits strewn like glitter across junk oil in a gutter, bits of another sky looking up, chipped and shimmering with chunks of glass shot into the street, sizzling and jumping and tumbling like crystal dice, screaming across the sky then burrowing through the earth, mumbling beneath the rocks, making the dirt jump with each throb of my heart, making the grass bend my way and sigh, the tiny remains scattered through other matter and the debris of ideas. Or ideals. Something spun on a nautilus path again and again and repeated endlessly, self-referential, recherché, chanted prayers and spinning mandalas, a twirling eternity spoken of like it was new and realized when it’s always been thus; this and nothing else.

Once I was standing in a Spanish Villa, in a patio. There was a fountain in the middle, the sound rushing past me and then echoing in the surrounding four walls. The tiles beneath my feet were slick with spray, slippery, dark around the edges where mildew had set in. It was a warm night and clear, stars obscured by the light of torches set around and subtle with their scent of oil. I’d stepped into the house of someone rich and meticulous – everything was exquisite, in balance – alive. Everything was as authentic as the hairs standing up damp on my neck.

And then I was spun off into something else, whatever bits were me coalesced into serendipity or spending the lifetime of a snail or being the number seven in intense realization, no me but only those things that I was in totality.

Immediate dissolution of ego, that denial of no common I a condition of the trip that I think made most people uncomfortable. In that summer of lost hours, I remember people embracing the vials and almost immediately rejecting the effect, the fear of losing who they were because who they were was all they’d known. To have all they’d known shown to be the sham was far too much for them to handle. A little E, some weed, big booze strewn back forcefully while kneeling in piss – all that was fine, safe. Getting ripped from here into there with no face left, well, that was intolerable.

A K-Hole is real, more real than you’ll ever know and it’s the ‘more real’ part that bothers so many people. Being a junkie just requires getting lost onside one’s self; in a K-Hole, Self is discarded with cold disregard. Poof, it’s gone and the rest of you, go there, now. Then there and there and so on. For about an hour of that and then, nothing, back to earth and feeling vertically challenged, shitfaced drunk. For about an another hour. And then everything’s fine. Unless you’re still worried about demons dancing on your soul.

It was a weird summer and things shifted in chaotic ways, convoluting across the bricks like an English Ivy. Since I don’t believe in souls or demons, everything was fine, I was having the time of my life. Go to Spain, be a number, yeah, I could deal with that. Vacation on the cheap