Nightmare On Acid Street

by | Oct 7, 2019 | Articles | 2 comments

In my mind, I flash back to a time years ago, and the image strikes me with peculiar clarity—the dismal boarding house where I lived when I was newly sober, the shattering acid flashback with its neon cockroaches skittering across the dirty ceiling. Then, further back in the recesses of my mind, the original bad trip: bloody slashes like knife wounds leaping out from a whirl of furiously moving geometric patterns.

That night went on for days, it seemed, when I lay alone on my bed, paralyzed by the horror of it all, staring awestruck at the ceiling. In a way more real than surreal, I felt I stood on a ledge and looked down. It was the ledge of my own sanity….

At length, the patterns shifted and receded, and I was back. Closer to sanity—forever changed, if not ruined.

Whizzers, p.153

 

On the 6th of each month, I send out a monthly newsletter to my subscriber list. I’m not entirely sure how I settled on that date. Maybe it’s because my birthday is November 6th, or maybe it was just happenstance. Whatever the case, I rarely request feedback, though I often ask my readers to tell their friends and colleagues about my work.

This month, I requested some very specific feedback, in an email with the tongue-in-cheek subject line Whaddya Want From Me? I asked my subscribers what they’d like to see more of in those monthly missives.

To my surprise, I got a reply that said, Tell us a drunk tale.

Well, hell, I can do that.

 

Active Means Something Different To Me…

Like most people with long-term sobriety, I also have a bit of colorful history that preceded it. In my case, the decades of sobriety now exceed my “active” years by a factor of three to one—about 30 years sober that followed a history of around 10 years—but some of those years brought adventures that would send a chill down any parent’s spine.

The quote above, from my recent novel Whizzers, is a case in point. Filled with much more autobiographical material than my previous three novels combined, Whizzers blurs the lines between a fictional version of me who travels through time and the actual me, with many of my real-life experiences. Some date from childhood, but others include the active years.

It was July, 1986. A buddy of mine came over to my parents’ house, where I was staying alone while they vacationed in Nova Scotia. We each took a hit of LSD, and I figured we’d be in for a night of hilarity.

Unfortunately, my friend had just taken the exact same dose the previous night. So while I began to feel the effects within the hour, he got no effect. A few beers along the way, and he was ready to head home and go to sleep, whereas I knew I’d be up all night.

After my buddy went home, my girlfriend at the time stopped by. She had zero experiences with psychedelics—and would eventually add spice to her own story by “upgrading” from dating me to dating a guy who dealt coke and carried a gun—but she was worried about me.

I assured her everything was fine, don’t worry about me, and so on. But it was not an enjoyable visit. She left, and now I had a good eight to ten hours ahead of me, alone.

 

The Ultimate Buzzkill

Thinking I’d listen to some fun music, I tuned the radio into a syndicated program called “The Grateful Dead Hour.” Right at the beginning of the show, the host announced that Jerry Garcia had slipped into a diabetic coma, and then queued up the dirge-like classic Mission In The Rain.

Already feeling jangly, my state of mind slid down like a snowball rolling down a hill. Like said snowball, it went faster and grew larger as it descended. Before long, I was alone and in a state I can only describe as dumbfounded.

It wasn’t just that I was a Deadhead, or that my mood had been shaken by the disappointing experiences with my friend or girlfriend. Anyone who has ever used these types of drugs will know that they shouldn’t be taken in an uncontrolled environment. Avoid all news, don’t answer any phone calls, and for God’s sake, don’t be alone. Those were all no-brainers when it came to psychedelics.

The scene above from Whizzers is pretty accurate. I can still recall, with morbid clarity, the Freddie Krueger-like slashes that appeared in the shifting patterns on the ceiling above my bed, where I lay transfixed, utterly alone. Just riding it out, as it were.

So there you have it—a true story of surviving the bad old days. Not exactly glamorous, but then, not much of that stuff really is, at least from today’s perspective. And isn’t that really what it’s all about?

For more tales of insanity and survival, check out Whizzers online from your favorite retailers.

endemic

From Pandemic to Endemic to…?

It’s funny how a blog like this can serve as sort of a substitute for a journal. Not “ha ha” funny, mind you. But “strange” funny for sure. All the way back in December 2021, I wrote a post called The Scary Weekend I Thought I Had COVID. I’d met up with a friend and...
healthcare

Our Broken Healthcare System Vs. The Decent, Affordable Healthcare of a Developing Nation

​Is your country’s health care system an egregious scam that bilks patients out of their money? Mine is. I didn’t have a blog post topic planned for today, but a bill that showed up in my mailbox changed that in a hurry. I’ve been talking about this anecdotally to...
next book

Whizzers: The Next Novel

Recently I sent out a subscriber-only newsletter about my next book launch. My fourth novel, Whizzers, is my current Work-In-Progress, and I plan to launch it in 2019. I was pleased to get some email responses to my newsletter, as I am looking to build the largest...
ISBN

More Fun With the ISBN Number

I've grown so accustomed to cranking out my blog posts on Monday afternoons, I almost forgot to schedule one for today. Thanks to the magic of WordPress, I can write this in the morning and schedule it for the afternoon. By the time you're reading this, I'll be out on...
Amazon

How Amazon Killed the Book Business

Okay, it’s Monday, and it’s Presidents’ Day, which really means it’s Washington’s birthday. Actually, he was born on February 22nd, but whatever. Last week was too busy to attend to this blog, and so is this week, holiday notwithstanding. So I'll be the first to admit...
sleep

New “Writer Problems” Series, Topic #8: Forgetting Your Best Ideas

We've all been there: lying in bed, on the edge of sleep, when a brilliant idea floats in from the ether. Maybe it's a fully-formed snippet of dialogue, or maybe something technical, like a major plot point. And before you drift off to sleep, you have to get up to...
Whizzers

The Glories of Language: Making Stuff Up and Other Fun Things I Do

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” - Pablo Picasso   One thing I was never especially afraid of was breaking the rules. What I was afraid of was getting caught. When I was young, I got into a tiny bit of trouble, but not much....

Writing Based on Experience

Recently, I’ve been writing more about writing, giving some explanations about why I write what I write…or, in the case of the three novels I’m currently promoting, why I wrote what I wrote. Brothers’ Hand, which takes place in the fictional town of Carverville, NY,...
Cataloging-In-Publication

What’s the Risk to Not Having A Cataloging-In-Publication (CIP) Data Block?

Over the past few weeks, I've been writing about "book-building" for indie authors. By that I mean putting a book together from your perspective as an author. So I haven't covered topics like cover design or interior design - you may choose those, but you're probably...
software

How Hard Is Software Supposed to Be?

So last week I took the Memorial Day holiday off from everything: no blog, no book project...nothing. Just me and my wife enjoying the day off from work. We don't get that many of those together, so it was nice to just hang out, sleep late, and watch mindless TV shows...
self-promotion

What’s The Problem With Shameless Self-Promotion?

While I still find it somewhat hard to believe, I've been on Twitter for almost eight years. I know this not only because Twitter shows Joined March 2015 on my profile but also because, even if they eliminate that feature, I use a tracker called Who Unfollowed Me? If...
MLK

MLK Day 2023

Here’s wishing everyone a safe, sane Martin Luther King Jr. Day. For many of us, today is always something of a day of mourning: not only mourning the loss of a great civil rights leader, but also mourning the turn our great nation seemed to take in recent years....

Twitter Tips for Authors in 2023

If you follow my blog, you probably connected with me via Twitter, whether you’re a fellow author or not. In 2020, I wrote a post about Twitter for fellow writers that got a good response. Three years later, the landscape has changed, but some Twitter best practices...
rails

Going Off The Rails (But Not On A Crazy Train)

Last April, I wrote a blog post called Back on Track With a Work-In-Progress. Part of that post was to talk about the difference between a “plotter” and a “pantser” (and to describe myself as a hybrid of the two, a “plantser”). Another, less obvious motive, was to...
French

Those Tricky French Authors and Their Obsessions

Today’s blog post was originally going to be Write Whatever the @#$% You Want, Pt. III. However, after seeing parts I and II lined up, I decided to call an audible and make it something less repetitive. Somehow the SEO gods have gotten into my head. As I’ve mentioned...
scared

Write Whatever the @#$% You Want, Pt. II

In last week’s post, I mentioned a pretty well-known author who has publicly reported his publisher “wouldn’t touch” a new release, in part because a character in his novel referred to herself as “fat.” I heard this story on a podcast, and I remember thinking, “Wait...
censorship

Write Whatever the @#$% You Want

I’ve been stewing on this for a while. It’s been brewing for quite a while. I could probably write a song about it (how about a rap?), but I don’t think I will. This is more of a blog post topic, and it might even deserve a series. And that’s the title and topic of...
gratitude

Should Every Month Be Gratitude Month?

When I was a kid, I loved Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz. I read it daily and collected nearly every paperback volume of the cartoon, so I could see what I’d missed since the comic strip’s inception in 1950.  Certain things stuck: quotes like “happiness is a warm puppy”...
robot

More Thoughts On Robot Writers and The Tech Dystopia

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog post here called When Will the Robot Overlords Replace Us? Apparently, I’m fairly obsessed with this stuff, because every time I come here and empty my brain, it seems to come up again. Today is no different. Part of the reason,...