“…in giving existence, a great law had been broken, and the result was a being whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in disorder; or with an order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the point of variety and arrangement was difficult or impossible to be discovered.”
- Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter
“…what would I give up for love?... not my balls!”
-Jason Leigh from “My Name is Earl”
There is a reason that, as we get older, psychedelic drugs begin to lose their mystique. Eventually life gets around to handing you something mind-blowing to an extent far beyond that which any pharmacy or ethno-botanist could replicate. LSD loses its palette. Life is luminous. It is consistently incredible, sometimes to the point of terrifying.
Anyway, what made me think about this? Well all kinds of things. But I think most recently I was watching the newscast – more follow up on the shootings that took place at Virginia Tech – and there was a lot of talk about the kids who shot up Columbine High School, which was eight years ago as I write this sentence; and the feeling I got from this was that we are not teaching these young people well enough. I write this as if I am old, but I am thirty six. I have lived through the teens and twenties. We now have an epidemic of young people who are willing to sacrifice their lives in order to propagate violence. We are watching it across the world and in our own neighborhoods.
I keep watching these news reports and I keep thinking, when they flash to the killers, ‘those poor kids.’ I feel a little guilty for feeling that way but they are so young! Forgive them Lord, they know not what they do and all that shit. How can you hate a fucked up twenty-something year old? And I know this is a sentiment that will make the more hardened mob turn red with anger. Sympathy for a killer; it is a conflicted emotion. But fuck it, that’s how I feel. I don’t “blame society” but we are letting these kids down. It isn’t the government or the institutions, it’s us. Institutions are symptoms. They try and heal a wound, they can’t prevent it. This detachment; the individual gravity that we all allot to our own lives, ego, callousness. Judgment. Fuck. It all comes back around. You can’t write your way out of this dilemna. Fuck fuck fuck.
I write this column every week. I think it’s been over a year now. I don’t really know why. I enjoy it ultimately. I like seeing my words in print and I like the feedback I get from people who read those words. Right now I am trying to write the most meaningful words I can but I don’t suspect that it is really coming across that way. My words are not brilliant and beautiful and they don’t come close to matching the excitement and glory of time. I don’t have the words. I don’t have the words. I am trying so hard to explain this to you and I just don’t have the words!
Ugh. I surrender. I give up. White flag, no más. I just don’t have it in me and I apologize for that. I remember a friend of mine one time who took a big blast of nitrous while he was frying on LSD, and I saw that smile and look of total ecstasy come over his face, and then his smile straightened and eventually sagged into a frown, and then he looked at me and said: “I saw it all, I understood it all. And I was so happy. But then I tried to explain it, and I realized I could not, and then I was sad.”
People, we are all in this together. Kids if you feel sad and alienated and alone you are not! E-mail, write, reach out to somebody. Young people are detonating themselves in market-places, annihilating one another in warfare, shooting each other in alley-ways, and killing each other is schools. Something is so wrong. And we are all accountable. No one is to blame without the complicity of the other. Not in this mess.
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