Armageddon, Satan and the Cringe

We should be so lucky. To have it all end at once. To have some ancient prophecy come true and blink us out of existence  No, it will be a slow motion apocalypse. The world itself will not cease to be, but everything that healthy, sane people love will be choked out, divided up, pre-packaged and bastardized. We've been handed a system that, the only way it can continue is to keep growing, the only way for it to keep growing is for us to consume. We're living longer, but less healthy. We're all going insane. No, the world will continue, but we'll go the way of the Mayans. We'd get off lucky if we blew up in a nuclear war or solar flares cooked us like Kenny Roger's rotisserie chickens. Then, we could blame someone or something else. The way it'll go down, we can only blame ourselves.

   We've been through this before. Remember Y2K? We all thought it was going to go down then. My friends and I sure did. I mean, we had all the Neurosis albums. Our acid riddled minds thought we could tell the future, thought we had uncovered some long hidden secrets of the universe. Man, the acid flowed in those days. I'd argue with any old hippy that the real LSD boom was in the mid 90's. It was all innocent fun at first. If you could scrape together $5 for one hit in the 8th grade then your night was figured out for you. At first we'd laugh, and look at the colors and the sounds. Then we started to discuss, to break it down. It was like walls were being leveled and there was a whole part of the world that we had never noticed before. Some people never got past the "look at the pretty colors" stage. Me, my mind went deep into it. Some people could put on a movie and just chill. Me, I'd come up with a theory that Starship Troopers was some weird white power propaganda and it freaked me out.

   We started freaking out when "the Cringe" happened. That's what we called it, "the Cringe". In hindsight, I think it came in to our group with certain people, or maybe it was inevitable, but the Cringe was the darkness that found it's way in to our little group. What was once fun and laughy and positive became dark and evil. It was around that time that we started joking about Satan a lot. I mean, we didn't even believe in Satan  but you should have seen the looks on people's faces when you were trying to walk down the hall in school and you can't get through all the bobble-heads so you'd just flash them the devil horns and say "Satan is your lord" or some shit like that. People were terrified. We just thought it was hilarious, how superstitious they all were. To me, it was the same as telling someone "Santa Claus is your master". Stupid shit, right? But we all wore black shit and drew pentagrams on stuff and it was all a big joke. I remember when one of us said "what if just by joking about it, we really are worshiping Satan? I mean, what if this is how you do it"? I remember when my friend, who would later become a Christian, first mentioned Jesus. He flipped out on some acid and was wigging out because we were making devil signs. We just laughed at him. It was all a joke, right?

   But things became dark, and we became angry. I became filled with anxiety all the time and when we tripped we started freaking out. I remember having the fear that I would never come back to normal. I remember feeling like I could fall off the earth, just go flipping off into madness with nothing to hold me down. We stopped learning things. It became destructive.

New Years eve, Y2K was the second to last time I ever took a hallucinogen. We had all camped out at the property, because that would be the perfect place to ride out Armageddon  The Property was my friend's family's land and it is my favorite spot on the earth. Of all the natural wonders I've seen in my life: Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, Yosemite, Glacier National Park, Zion, The Badlands, etc....and this little 160 acre plot of land in northeast Arkansas is the most beautiful place on earth to me. In the foothills of the Ozarks, full of rocky red clay dirt....there's a creek and a pond and a cliff. My friends and I would ride dirt bikes and shoot guns, wade in the creek, catching crawdads and baiting our hooks with them to catch the little red eyed rock bass out of there. We'd drink all day long there. We shot our first movie there, Many Evil with a VHS camcorder and a handful of rubber masks and old man hats. We'd drive my Toyota station wagon through the trails with people hanging on to the bike rack. I wrecked the 3 wheeler there and tore my nut sack open and cracked my pelvis. Yeah, if when I died, i could go to my favorite time and place for all eternity, it would be those times at the property  It was wild, there were no other people there and we could do whatever we wanted.

We sat around the fire in the woods to wait out the end of the world. At about 11 pm, someone offered me some mushrooms. Now, I know there's some hippies that are all :"Mushrooms won't make you freak out, brah". Shut up, hippy. Even the Native American Shamans that would use hallucinogens as a spiritual guide would eventually lose their minds if they used it too much. And we were full in to the Cringe at that point. Things were dark. In the last few years we had lost Jason B, who snorted up a bunch of blow and ate a ten strip of acid and did a head dive out of a 3rd floor window, and Mike, who rumor has it had eaten some mushrooms the day he hung himself. We, as a group were freaking the fuck out. And boy did I freak the fuck out. The world did end in my mind. I had to go inside and lie on the bed and I spent the whole night twisting and roiling and sweating out madness. I saw the Apocalypse play out on the ceiling. I saw Jack booted storm troopers marching. "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever" kind of shit. I saw fire and chaos, and I thought it would never end. And sometime in the blue light of dawn I fell asleep.

Needless to say, the world didn't end. Like I said, we'll never get off that easy. We're going to be around for awhile. We might as well start figuring out how to right this sinking ship.

I only took a hallucinogen one more time, but that's another story. Sometimes i feel remnants of the Cringe. Sometimes I get chemical shiver reminders. Sometimes I get stuck in the patterns in walls. Sometimes I see red lightning pulsing through everything. but i did learn a lot from it. Once in a blue moon I'll hear some young kid talk about LSD and my spit gets all thick and I can instantly recall that taste, like a metallic slug. I wouldn't eat that shit now if you paid me, but if someone were to ask me if THEY should eat it or not, I couldn't tell them yes or no. While i did retain some sort of knowledge (it's nature I'll have to get in to another time) I've also seen people run out into traffic naked, people smush bananas all over themselves,  people eat cigarette butts out of ashtrays and people with no shred of humanity in their eyes...just reduced to beasts.

I think that it took all that exploring for me to realize how powerful the mind is. The mind can create a reality that is so insulated from the truth. We used to talk about how heaven and hell are states of mind. Once Jason B. told me that he thought that hell was when you were broken off from the source and just spinning around in your own mind. But what is the source? The source is the thing that will not allow the world to end. The source is the thing that binds us all together. The source is what separates us from the animals. When they say that we were "made in the image of our creator" they mean that we are creators ourselves, and that means we have the possibility to create ourselves out of the mess we've made. The possibilities are endless  It's great to be alive.