The Dog Turned into a Lion

In a recent post I made reference to a hallucinatory experience I had many years ago. It's a simple story that took place in the spring of 1979, at a time when I experimented with LSD. (Girls: remember, you are NOT to emulate your father!) Well, on one ocassion, I think it must have been a Saturday, we decided to take some LSD around midday. Before long people started to wander off and I got the bright idea that a bike ride would be just the thing. So off I went, headed for the country roads not far from campus. The landscapes I thought I was so familiar with were looking both distorted and more beautiful than ever. I felt as if I were inside a constantly changing English landscape painting. I was enjoying myself tremendously, but I recall feeling a touch of sadness about the impossibility of sharing this enjoyment. Yes, I was having a grand time, but was also feeling intimations of loneliness. (In retrospect, I suspect many twenty year olds experience this; not necessarily loneliness itself, but an acute awareness of its threat.) At one point I found myself coming up a long but not steep hill at the top of which there was a small farmhouse. As I got to the top of the rise I could see there was a big dog on the front porch of the house. When I was just passed the house I noticed that the dog decided he was going to chase me a little. At first it seemed he wanted to have fun, but as his trot gathered speed I started to fear his attitude was perhaps a little too aggressive for fun. I pedaled harder. He was getting really close to me. A little further and I'd start to pick up speed on the downward slope. I looked back and, oh my, the dog had just turned into a big lion! For a couple or few seconds I felt really terrified, but I still had enough of the rational part of my brain functioning so that in very short time I was able to remind myself that, in fact, dogs do not turn into lions and that my brain was simply experiencing a particularly strong visual hallucination due to the effects of the LSD. And what a hallucination! What I mean by that is the utterly convincing, "photographic" quality of the hallucinatory image, which, for a short time also had a scary auditory component. Roar! Right at my heels. It's not that the dog 'looked kind of like a lion'. Not that at all! No, for a brief moment I was seeing a real lion, big mane, long tall... a lion in every detail. Scary! Fortunately, the lion quickly turned back into a dog which stayed within the bounds of its yard. As I coasted down the hill I tried to process what I had just experienced, but I imagine I didn't get much past "wow!"  I don't remember too much of the rest of the day except that the bike ride was followed by a gloriously wonderful walk in the woods (with no scary hallucinations!) during which I determined that big old trees were the true sages of the universe. Innocent nonsense for the most part. For days and weeks afterward I kept coming back to the experience and I think my curiosity about it even prodded me to pay closer attention in my symbolic logic class. Truth claims! And it also led to some extra time in the library and the beginnings of interest in neurology! (Above, "Dedham Vale", by John Constable.)

Internet and Memory

Perhaps stimulated by a reference I made in my previous post to a past hallucinatory experience, this morning I read an article in the Times about the world of deadheads and the amazing online availability of their concert archives. This led me to a site where by searching "Buffalo, 1979", I had at my instant disposal information that renewed and corrected my knowledge of that memorable weekend. The concert was January 20th, a Saturday night. Shea's Theatre. For some reason, with the passing of the years I had come to think it had been early spring, no doubt because the weather that weekend was very mild. I do recall quite well heading out from the Hamilton campus on a bright sunny morning. The decision to go to Buffalo had been almost spontaneous. I believe it was over breakfast that my fellow Co-op friend, Chris (well, more a good acquaintance than real friend, as today I can't even remember his last name) suggested we head out for Buffalo, four hours away. Buffalo? Dead concert tonight? Sure, why not? So we got a ride to the entrance to the thruway and stuck out our thumbs. Good thing we had the beer in the Coke machine back at the Co-op. On the road with Matts beer and several joints, a sunny day... who cares if we make it to Buffalo. But we did. And incredibly Chris found someone who had extra tickets. Fifteen dollars? The theater was small and beautiful, and I remember being impressed by the nice bar they had set up in the lobby. The last thing in the world I needed was more drugs, but hey, wouldn't a few shots of Jack Daniels be just the thing to get me in the mood for the concert? That and a "hit of acid." Hey, where'd that come from? Booze, pot, LSD... what else could I put in my much abused body? Hey, where'd Chris go? Not much later: where did reality go? Man, the lights in this theatre are soooo strange. And the music is getting really out there. Let's just wander around... I still remember a young woman, around my age, slapping some kind of sticker onto my shirt and saying something like 'check out the party backstage'. Something like that. It's all pretty fuzzy. Anyway, I guess I now had a backstage pass so I headed off in that direction. And I discovered why they call themselves the Dead. Lots of passed out people. Seemed like a caricature, but there really were people just lying around, on the floor, on top of equipment boxes. Crazy. I stayed for a while then at the end of the concert went off in search of Chris. It must have been around midnight when I found him. Hmm, what now? So we just wandered. Wander round: our principle expertise back then. It was actually very funny: we ended up in the "black neighborhood" and strolled into a bar where the looks we got were priceless. Right out of a movie. Two white college kids, looking rather worse for the wear. But we were welcomed in and served our drinks. I think we ended up trying to play some pool. But the bars eventually close, so then it was more wandering. We ended up at a bus station, tried to get a little sleep as we waited for dawn, waited for the drugs to wear off a little, and the energy to head back to the thruway. We had excellent luck and made it back to Hamilton in daylight. And now these memories have a date: January 20th, 1979. And a song list. The dog-turns-into-a-lion trick, alluded to earlier, is a separate memory. "... what a long, strange trip it's been." Indeed.

Balk!

Facebook is a curious phenomenon and it's interesting to see how incredibly fast it's evolving. I don't regret joining it because it's been an amazingly effective means of reconnecting with friends form college, high school, and even childhood. The other day I received the following message:

Alright, it's maybe 8th grade, you're pitching. I'm in left, pepper is thick in the air. So you go into your wind-up and I yell out "THIS GUYS MOTHER WEARS A JOCK STRAP!" You crack-up and balk, the umpire whips off his mask, halts the game and reams me out but good in front of everybody. As I'm standing there like a dope getting balled out, I look to the mound and you are howling. 

Ring any bells?

I suspect it was actually 6th or 7th grade when that happened, but in any case, what a funny recollection. And now I know why that major league career I was dreaming of never worked out. It was all Grier's fault! He was so good at not letting me forget how absurd it all is. We sure did have a lot of fun. And it's still a lot of fun. The path from a ball field in Bronxville to an apartment overlooking the beach in Malaga could be traced in many, many different ways, one of which might be to see the dots connecting the lines as absurd chance happenings that bleed outsized shares of incredibly good fortune.