#james's trauma is real and extensive it's just not the focus of this post

[tiredandoptimistic]

Sometimes I will be chilling and then I remember Grace Blackthorn and Christopher Lightwood and I start clawing at the walls.

Because like. Okay. Christopher grew up in a loving extended family. He's always been fully accepted for who he is, but he's never quite been understood. When it comes to his passion for science, even his best friends seem to be humoring him. Thomas assists him in the lab because he cares about Christopher, not because he cares about running experiments. Henry is the only one who really gets why Christopher cares so much about this stuff, to everyone else it's just something he's weirdly intense about.

Then there's Grace, who's been raised to see herself as nothing but a weapon. She's always been valued for her pretty face, and she knows for a fact that no one other than Jesse gives a fuck about her as a person (and even Jesse gives up on her in the end). She hasn't had the chance to find out who she is as a person or what she really cares about, because she's been trapped in Tatiana's net of abuse since she was a child. She wants to get free and do better, but she's basically got the choice of keeping up the lie and being seen as a decoration or revealing herself and being seen as a monster.

The first time the two of them meet, it's off-page. Christopher escorts Grace home in a carriage, and we get some jokes from the other Thieves about how he's probably talking her ear off. Again, there's the assumption that Christopher's interest in science is annoying and that Grace is a passive observer. But that's not the case! I love their relationship so much because Christopher finally finds someone who matches his enthusiasm and Grace finds someone who respects her intelligence. They're both able to be their most sincere selves with each other, and they're fully accepted for it. More than that, they're delighted by each other.

Part of what makes Grace's situation so precarious is that she knows that the things she's done on Tatiana's orders are wrong. She released James from the bracelet in ChoG when Tatiana was out of the picture, but she didn't explain the situation to him and she continued using her powers to manipulate Charles into breaking his engagement with Ari. She didn't want to hurt people, but she prioritized her own safety over any sort of honesty because she believed that if the truth came out they would all turn on her. Because she hadn't been allowed to have any relationships not built on manipulation, she had no one to support her if she tried to leave Tatiana. Plus, in ChoT we see that the one person who was supposed to really love her (Jesse) was still quick to turn on her when he learned the truth of what she'd done.

Once Grace gets sent to the Silent City, she wasn't expecting any sort of forgiveness. She could get pity, because she was an abused teenage girl, but she was still being defined by factors outside of her control. Then there was Christopher, who still came to visit her. It wasn't because he felt bad for her, it was because he remembered her intellect and genuinely wanted her help with his experiments. Yes it was an act of kindness to keep her company down there, but it was crucial that he also needed her help. Grace finally had a chance to be useful and do some good in the world thanks to her own interests and skills, rather than her looks and her curse.

I don't think that the people Grace hurt are under any obligation to forgive her. However, that doesn't mean that she deserves to spend her life being punished for the things she was forced to do as a teenager. Christopher is essential to her story because he proves that she's able to be loved and forgiven, that there's hope for her to find something good for herself beyond the reach of Tatiana's vendetta. The two of them don't need to be defined by how other people see them, they can start fresh and make something new together.

Also, I just think it's really cute to see two people bonding over a shared interest that is weird and confusing to others. They don't need to be palatable or understood by anyone else, because they have each other and their many exciting explosions.

[two-are-the-trees]

Jazz and The Gothic

I haven’t seen much discussion about the place of jazz music in the gothic genre but as I mentioned briefly in my post about creepy cartoons, jazz songs of the early to mid 20th century often featured dark subject matter and imagery in their lyrics, extremely reminiscent of other gothic media. Additionally, a lot of this music heavily influenced later gothic media, like the cartoons they were featured in, as well as many more current works like compositions by Danny Elfman and the miniseries, Over the Garden Wall. It also performed a similar function of classic gothic literature, examining various social or moral issues in complex ways and focusing on uneasiness and uncanniness to explore structures within society. 

Of course the first name that comes to mind when discussing gothic jazz is Cab Calloway, one of the most prominent jazz artists of the 20th century. His distinct wailing voice and his unpredictable movements in his dancing not only exemplified the improvisational and creative qualities of jazz music, but also created eerie moods in his darker songs. The lyrics of these songs also tell tragic stories and imply horrific images. Arguably his most popular song, “Minnie the Moocher” which was accompanied by surreal, disturbing animation in the Betty Boop cartoon of the same name, alludes to prevalent drug problems during the Great Depression of the 1930s. It tells the story of Minnie, who gets into the world of cocaine and opium thanks to her boyfriend (who is most likely a bootlegger or drug-related criminal). Despite the mention of fabulous riches, the song ends with the words, “Poor Min,” implying that she met a tragic fate. This becomes clear at the realization that a real Indianapolis woman named Minnie Gayton, who fell into homelessness and perpetual begging, served as the inspiration for the song. 

“Minnie the Moocher” also has an equally dark sequel song called “The Ghost of Smokey Joe.” The gothic motifs in this song are more obvious as it’s sung from the point of view of the ghost of Minnie’s old boyfriend after he died (presumably of a drug overdose). Smokey Joe comes to haunt the drug dens he used to hang around in. He demands to know where Minnie is and explains that he has a chariot to take her to his “estate in Hades,” implying that his illegal activities landed him a spot in eternal damnation, and he plans to drag his girlfriend down with him. This song not only warns against the personal consequences of using dangerous drugs, but also the moral responsibility of drug lords for “dragging others down” with drug addiction and abuse. 

Cab Calloway also sang “San Francisco Fan,” a warning about the dangers of gambling. The song itself focuses on the girlfriend of an abusive gambler. She is forced to live in poverty so that her boyfriend can use her wages for more bets until she eventually takes a bullet for him after he is accused of cheating. The song serves as a funeral dirge for the woman, with a melancholy dragging beat and mournful lyrics. 

Calloway’s darkest song, however, evokes death throughout. “St. James’s Infirmary,” another song accompanied by creepy animation in “Betty Boop in Snow White,” laments the death of yet another unfortunate woman caught up in the criminal underworld of bootlegging and drugs. She is described as “stretched out on a long white table, so sweet, cool and so fair.” This gentle imagery of the corpse evokes the tragic beauties of Edgar Allen Poe’s work, cut down before their time. Her boyfriend then goes on to talk about his own death. He details how he wants his funeral and body prepared and says “The gang’ll know I died standing pat,” meaning that he’ll die sticking to his beliefs and lifestyle. This implies that he knows his current life in the criminal underworld will eventually lead to his death, just as it led to his girlfriend’s.

These cautionary tales of poverty and death did not exist in a void. The constant threat of destitution due to the economic crash of the Great Depression led many to desperate means to make a living. The criminal industries of bootlegging and drug dealing flourished, often leading to the violence and death depicted in Calloway’s music. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, in which seven gangsters were gunned down horrifically, is just one famous example. With popular drug trends also, of course, came addiction and overdose. Even more sinister is the fact that during Prohibition, officials were encouraged to poison barrels of alcohol to discourage illegal drinking, leading to even more deaths. 

Cab Calloway was not the only famous jazz musician to sing about death and tragedy. Billie Holiday also released several songs that live on today as haunting examples of gothic jazz. One of these songs is “Gloomy Sunday,” notable for the controversy surrounding it. Originally composed by Hungarian musician, Rezsó Seress, and translated by Sam M. Lewis, it was released in the U.S. with a performance by Billie Holiday. The song has a mournful tone and lyrics that focus on death and immeasurable sorrow after losing a loved one. Perhaps more unnerving about the song are the many mentions of suicide, as the narrator sings, “Soon there'll be candles, and prayers that are said I know; let them not weep; let them know that I'm glad to go.” After it’s release, many real life suicides were blamed on the song, as rumors circulated that people killed themselves while listening to the tune. These rumors were mostly unfounded, but the urban legend does indicate that in the public eye, “Gloomy Sunday” was unique in its dark tone, and it still holds that reputation to this day.

Another well-known Billie Holiday song is “Strange Fruit,” with an even more disturbing subject. The song was originally a poem written by Abel Meeropol and remains one of the most influential pieces of African American poetry to this day. The poem and song evoke the monstrous practice of lynching black people, which most often occurred in the Southern U.S. The song describes the bodies hanging from trees in horrific detail. It tells of “Blood on the trees and blood and the root” and “The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh, then the sudden smell of burning flesh.” The jarring contrast between imagery of fresh flowers and fruit trees and imagery of rotting, mutilated bodies conveys not only the trauma lurking behind the facade of the peaceful Southern countryside, but also the frequency at which violence against black people occurred, as the bodies became part of the landscape. It’s a song that clearly uses horror and fear to convey the emotions felt by black people across the nation, evoking the tactics of the gothic genre to expose this dark reality. 

The last song I’ll discuss is “Driva Man,” written by Max Roach. This is a song released during the later era of jazz in the 1960’s during the Civil Rights movement and explores more experimental tempos and tones after the big band craze of the 1950s. The song’s lyrics are delivered with only an occasional drum beat before the fuller musical interlude, creating a very ominous tone. The lyrics themselves tell of the violence faced by black slaves at the hands of merciless slave drivers (or even black workers in the 1960’s facing unfair workplace practices at the hands of their “slave driving” bosses). Some lyrics include, “When his cat 'o nine tail fly, you’d be happy just to die” and “Runaway and you'll be found, by his big old red bone hound.” Both lyrics evoke slave owner practices of using whips and dogs to control, and often even kill, their slaves. The casual delivery of the chilling lyrics is even more devastating as it reveals how commonplace these practices really were. The timing of the song’s release is significant, as it expresses the horrors faced by an entire group, even long after slavery was abolished. 

Of course there are many other jazz songs with dark tones and subject matter, and many more that inspired the gothic genre in different forms of media. The jazz genre was created by black artists and often infused with the struggles and atrocities faced by black communities. Therefore, much of jazz uses tactics of the gothic in order to express the fear felt by these communities, and by extension society as a whole when faced with nation-wide issues. These are just a few well known examples of jazz’s place in the larger gothic timeline.

[boogywoogy]

“Neptunes Lair” -- Drexciya (1999)

I have been thinking a lot lately about the increasingly popular term “speculative fiction”--media and texts that imagine different possibilities of the future or of our current understanding the world. I am specifically drawn to those engaged with real issues that affect our lived experiences--historical trauma, gender dynamics, racial oppression, and other kinds of real inequality. Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness strikes me as a perfect example of this--it serves to imagine the extensive consequences of living in a society without gender, and how alien our gendered experience would seem in comparison.

Another perfect example of this kind of speculative fiction comes in the form of the Detroit techno/house group Drexciya, comprised of members James Stinson and Gerald Donald. A lot of ink has been spilled about this project, but their music is something I think even more people should be listening to and thinking about. According to the mythology constructed by the artists, Drexciya is the name of a country within the Black Atlantic, a network of underwater societies whose inhabitants are descended from the unborn children of pregnant African women thrown over the side of slave ships. Their fetuses learned to breathe in the water of the womb, and later the water of the Atlantic ocean, and developed an extremely technologically advanced society under the waves. The sounds on the album build into this narrative--the Drexciyans have perfected sonic weapons in their war against other nations of the Black Atlantic. Certain songs also feature audio of daily life (see “Bubble Metropolis” from 1993 for Drexciyan aquabahn traffic-control).

This kind of speculative fiction is extremely powerful. It takes the unimaginable trauma of millions of Africans and re-frames the narrative as one of gained power, as well as highlighting the similarities between the kidnapping of Africans and the kind of alien invasion so often featured in traditional science fiction. Science fiction speculates about the worst possible outcomes--armageddon, apocalypse, hostile invasion--when these unimaginables have historically been reality for millions. I think Mark Sinker sums it up perfectly in his 1992 essay “Loving the Alien” (which you can read in its entirety here):

“The ships landed long ago: they already laid waste whole societies, abducted and genetically altered swathes of citizenry, imposed without surcease their values. Africa and America -and so by extension Europe and Asia - are already in their various ways Alien Nation. No return to normal is possible: what "normal" is there to return to? Part of the story of black music (the affirmative, soul-gospel aspect) has always been this - that losing everything except basic dignity and decency is potentially a survivable disaster.”

Ok so--this seems like a lot of hefty intellectual weight to be carried by what is, at its core, a dance record. But there’s a lot of intellectually hefty dance music, from Afrofuturist techno to DJ Sprinkles’ Midtown 120 Blues (maybe the subject of a future post on this blog). I think it’s important to recognize that music like this can wrestle with big ideas just as effectively as something you’d find in a sound installation in an art museum, or in a critical theory essay. Perhaps even more so, because its philosophical heft kind of sneaks up on you.

There is so much to say about this record’s place in Afrofuturist worldbuilding traditions, in Detroit techno music, etc… but what does it sound like? From the moment you are dropped into the intro’s chanting drone and bubbly speech samples, the deep dark ocean imagery comes to mind easily. Acid-y breakbeat with submarine pings really set this record firmly in a 90s tradition of dance music. Some of these songs (“Andreaen Sand Dunes”) are built upon very pretty synth riffs, whereas others are rooted in more abrasive mechanical whirring (“Drifting into a Time of No Future”). Throughout the record, however, funk and disco remain bubbling below the surface, infusing this record with just straight-out fun (“Jazzy Fluids” has this great moment of silence followed by an adorable tinkly synth line… great stuff). Do yourself a favor and next time you need to really focus on something (or boogie) slap this record on.

The song featured below is not on this record--it was recorded in 1992--but it was part of a larger re-release of older singles of theirs, and it’s my favorite song they recorded, so I had to share.

[tempocannon]

The Underdogs: St. Louis’s Record Labels

[A feature I wrote in spring 2014 about St. Louis record labels. Amazingly dated already, but such is the lot of articles about DIY scenes.]

[Eads bridge, STL.]

So, here’s the situation: in the last 20 years, digital production and the Internet have demolished the traditional record industry. There are all kinds of statistics to show the dire state of the giant record companies of old, but the fundamental fact is that record sales go down every year. According to a January 8th Rolling Stone recap of the music industry’s performance, even digital downloads sank 6% from 2012 to 2013. Major labels are mummies, the big indie labels—Merge, Drag City, Jagjaguwar, and all the others—have staked out some space on a sinking ship, and Record Store Day itself is a tourniquet, an annual reminder that physical products are alright. Of course, all that is totally fine, because musicians are still out there making music. The same technologies that annihilated the record industry blew open the doors of music production, so now you can now record, distribute, and promote music for a fraction the former price. In the age of Bandcamp, it’s totally feasible musicians to do it all.

Who, then, are the intrepid souls who start small labels, who throw their time and money down what Robert Severson, Pancake Master of Pancake Productions, calls “one big money pit?” Why do they stick out their necks for the creative projects of others?

We asked the daredevils who run St. Louis’ labels, and they say a top reason is the joy inherent in working hard on something good. Running a record label is an artistic process of its own, with all the highs and low that come with the territory. For Joe Schwab of Euclid Records, it’s about the work itself. As he puts it, “my favorite thing about doing a label is simple: dealing with creative people. Not just the musicians, but the cover artists and graphic designers as well.” Pat Grosch of Mounds Music echoes the sentiment. He got into the game because being “around extremely creative individuals as they let you into their projects, and thus their hearts, is reward enough.”

People start running labels for pragmatic reasons, too. Local scenes are generally composed of loosely organized groups of friends with various degrees of interest in promoting themselves. Forming a label can coordinate the knowledge and energy of young and veteran members of a city’s scene, as well as provide an infrastructure for artistic cross-pollination. Damon Davis of the FarFetched Collective sees his label as an artists’ union. He started the organization, he says, to interact “with artists and [foster] connections between us in the music community.” Robert Severson of Pancake Productions was frustrated with the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of a lot of St. Louis music, so he started his label, Pancake Productions, partly just “to be an entity that never died.” And a coordinated scene is easier to explain to outsiders, so a label can be a doorway to out-of-state promotion. As Extension Chord’s Tim Rakel puts it, “an umbrella label seemed a good strategy for promoting music from Saint Louis.”

And then there’s the most fundamental concern of all: getting the music out! Major labels and even the big independent labels have simply never had an interest in putting out a lot of adventurous and underground music. Gabe Karabell of Don’t Touch My Records says it best: “Small labels have been killing it since the '50s and '60s, so I'm not surprised that the real jams remain underground to this day.”

Small labels work hard for the bands on the ground, and we owe so much excellent music to lonely owners. To get a sense of what’s really going on in the vinyl mines, we conducted a census of a dozen local labels in honor of this year’s Record Store Day. See a label you’re interested in? Check it out! Don’t think any of these labels look cool? Go forth! Start your own!

Twelve Saint Louis Labels

Big Muddy Records 

In a business where many labels close up shop soon after they open, Big Muddy Records is a crusty old uncle on the scene. Chris Baricevic lost a bet and started up the operation in 2005 with the self-titled Vultures EP, and gradually began putting out records by some of the city’s best-known Americana acts, including Bob Reuter’s Alley Ghost, The Hooten Hallers, Rum Drum Ramblers, and Pokey LaFarge. According to Baricevic, big things are in the works for Big Muddy: “a constant cycle of life and death, ulcers and dishwashing jobs, and we might have a hot dog party for our brother Brice.” He’d also like to say that Record Store Day should be about giving record store employees gifts.

Extension Chord Records 

Tim Rakel and Melinda Cooper of The Union Electric started Extension Chord Records last year as a way of releasing work by their side projects Town Cars and The Chainsaw Gentlemen. The label racked up five releases in its first year, and it’s moving fast: Town Cars’ debut CD is coming out this year, and the honchos are considering expanding the label’s roster. According to Rakel, the organizational headaches and sometimes glacial movement of the production process can be demoralizing, but ultimately, “it makes most sense to go ahead and do everything on your our terms.’”

Euclid Records 

Euclid Records (the store) has been around for thirty years, but the label has only been putting music out since 2009. The label got started pressing in-store sessions onto vinyl singles and selling them for the benefit of The New Orleans Musicians’ Relief Fund, but Euclid has quickly expanded the roster, issuing full-lengths by Troubadour Dali and Sleepy Kitty. Joe Schwab, the owner of both the label and the shop, sees underground labels and independent stores as closely entwined. “The only game in town these days are independent record stores,” he said, “and we're the ones that have been pushing indie bands and indie labels.”

Tower Groove Records 

Tower Groove Records is less a label than a loose collective of South City bands. Tower Groove’s been silent for a few months, but in the last several years Adam Hesed, Jason Hutto, and the rest of the collective have made some very unique releases happen. They got things rolling with a double LP compilation of 22 bands, and last year Tower Groove released a mail-order singles series. Each month of 2013, subscribers received a brand-new single that paired two local bands.

Mounds Music 

Mounds Music is the brand-new project of a few of the Bug Chaser dudes, an effort to put high-quality analog recording into the hands of local acts. Pat, Jake, and Zeng secured a start-up grant from the Regional Arts Commission, and they’ll be producing between 6 and 10 cassette releases in the next year. According to Pat Grosch, Mounds will be a creative platform, “an attempt to provide some new opportunities to musicians, and help let them focus on their craft—music—as we manage the production side.” The list of future collaborators is long, but Mounds is currently cooking up cassettes by Maximum Effort, The Bad Dates, Kisser, and Zak M. Details will be revealed soon.

Eat Tapes 

Eat Tapes is Matt Stuttler’s cottage industry, an all-cassette label that started when Stuttler moved from putting out tapes for his own projects to putting out tapes for his friends’ projects. The label has released material for Burrowss, Bruiser Queen, and others, but Stuttler has made a specialty out of sticking two bands together on one split tape. Split tapes are definitely in line with the label’s mission. As he puts it, “labels like Eat Tapes operate on a local/regional level that concentrates on supporting bands/artists that aren't going to necessarily have mass appeal. But who cares about that?”

Don’t Touch My Records 

The mission of D.T.M.R. is simple. Gabe Karabell, founder and tapemaker, says, “I just want to document some of the bands that I like before they break up.” Karabell is casual about the whole thing, but since 2012, the label has been in the right place at the right time to release music by The Brainstems, Rat Heart, Wild Hex, and Shaved Women. The only downside, Karabell says, is waiting in line at the Post Office to mail tapes when I'm late for work.” What’s up next? The debut of Self Help, “a new band with folks from Doom Town, Los Contras, The Vultures, Jack Grelle's band and the Bill McClellan Motherfuckers.”

Spotted Race 

For the last year and a half, Spotted Race has been churning out tapes from the city’s punk and hardcore underbelly. As operator Martin Meyer puts it, Spotted Race exists to release “bands that deserve to be put out but probably wouldn't be otherwise.” Meyer has assembled around 25 releases, by hand, for free, all to get the word out about bands that would normally never be heard outside the city. His work is paying off, though: Spotted Race has sold enough tapes, at home and around the world, to afford to release a Ruz flexi disc, a Black Panties flexi, a Trauma Harness LP, a Nos Bos flexi, a Dem Scientist 7-inch, and a Lumpy and the Dumpers 7-inch.

FarFetched Collective 

The goals of FarFetched go beyond simply distributing music. According to founder Damon Davis (LooseScrewz), the hip-hop centered collective aims to “create and nurture all forms of progressive music everywhere,” and even more fundamentally, to “create art that is genuine and thoughtful and make a living from that for my artists and myself.” FarFetched is home to artists including Scripts ‘n Screwz, 18andCounting, CaveofswordS, and Black James. Davis calls the label fundamentally focused on community and collaboration, an “artists’ union” rather than a hierarchical business. Look out for releases this summer, including a vinyl release of label comp Prologue III.

BDR/Rerun Records 

The BDR/Rerun collaboration is all about issuing lost gems of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Jason Ross, of Rerun, and Matt Harnish, of BDR, have done much to dig up, dust off, and reissue St. Louis punk, post-punk, and rock ‘n’ roll gems from The Welders, Max Load, and The Retros. After a period of silence, the label is returning April 1st with a bunch of releases from vintage Milwaukee bands.

Encapsulated Records 

 Encapsulated is the new, improved incarnation of I Hate Punk Rock Records. In 2012, owner Mike Jones opened Encapsulated Studios, a punk rock fortress in Maplewood where bands can practice and record, and where the operations of the label are centered. The label is still home to punk and hardcore acts from St. Louis and around the country, including Bent Left, Black for a Second, Fister, The Haddonfields, and Jetty Boys.

Pancake Productions 

Robert Severson, Pancake Master, created Pancake Productions as a production company for his student films. Sometime in the early 2000s, though, he started a one-man band, Googolplexia, and got caught up in music as well. Severson began by issuing albums by broken-up bands, a move that was not financially lucrative but certainly reflects the label’s ethos. Severson says, “Pancake Productions has never been about turning a profit. In some ways it's not even about breaking even. Really it's just about using every last dime (of both real money and credit extended to me) that I have to get good music out and available.” There’s a lot ahead for Pancake Productions, including a Vanilla Beans EP, a potential Stonechat CD, and “some top-secret things in the works for summertime.”

[foursprout-blog]

No Need To Die Twice: Why I’ll Never Do Ketamine Again

New Post has been published on http://foursprout.com/happiness/no-need-to-die-twice-why-ill-never-do-ketamine-again/

No Need To Die Twice: Why I’ll Never Do Ketamine Again

WATCHING THE AMBULANCE PULL AWAY from the curbside, I entered the dark club and asked the bouncer what was happening. “Some guy passed out in the bathroom. Overdosed on Special K.” 

“What the fuck is ‘special K?’ Isn’t that a cereal?”

“It’s an animal tranquilizer. He took too much and went into a K-hole.”

The term ‘K-hole’ was the most frightening slang I’d ever heard for a drug experience. Recreational drugs are supposed to induce euphoria and enlightenment, not shove you down a black hole and force an ambulance to haul away your drooling hulk.

It was at that moment that I knew I would have to try Special K.

ON A BLACK RAINY DECEMBER NIGHT a year later, a twinkly-eyed, goatee-wearing young man stopped me at a party and told me he enjoyed my writing. As we began talking, I pegged him as a “Dr. Buzz” type—my label for a white male who compensates for possible social awkwardness by knowing everything there is to know about illegal drugs. He was with a nerdy friend I’ll dub Mr. Spectacles.

Dr. Buzz revealed that he was on a paid sabbatical from work and, to pass the time, he’d been shooting ketamine hydrochloride—the medical name for Special K—into his ass muscles daily for the past eleven nights. He said that after doing ketamine, the “real” world seemed boring. He seemed bright and well-adjusted enough that I began to trust him. Touting the drug’s glories, he and his bespectacled chum offered to share some K with my female companion and me. I still suffered from the impression that ketamine was merely a tranquilizer that would induce a heavily stoned “body high” rather than the most terrifying psycho-death trip of my life. He cautioned that since K impaired motor skills, it was not a social drug and we’d have to ditch the party and repair to his quiet lair on the city’s far fringes. He promised we’d be lucid after an hour or two and that he’d drive us home.

Foolishly, we agreed.

WHEN WE REACHED HIS SAD, FLAT HOME, the lights were off and a man was already there sitting in darkness, bathed in droning electronic music. When Dr. Buzz flicked on the lights, the man’s eyes were so glassy, he appeared retarded. He had reverted back to Apeman and looked at Dr. Buzz with faint recognition.

Dr. Buzz and Mr. Spectacles had already burned down some liquid ketamine into butter-colored powder for needlephobes such as me and my girl. He cut out three huge lines for us—enough to make a sandwich.

“That seems like a lot,” I protested, sitting on a couch.

“No,” he insisted, carefully drawing two syringefuls of liquid K from a vial with which to ass-spike himself and Mr. Spectacles. “That’s a normal dose. You’ll have to do that much to feel the full effect. You can do two lines, and she can do one.”

He told us to snort it but to avoid trying to swallow it as if it were cocaine—just crush the crystals in our noses using our fingers. He said that within ten seconds, we’d feel a warmth in our feet that would rise through our bodies.

After snuffling my two monster rails, I handed the bill and mirror to my girlfriend, who inhaled her portion. I closed my eyes for a second and then looked over at her. She appeared to be already dead.

BOOM! Almost instantly I felt warmth and a savage disorientation. I began to feel sucked inside a hurricane’s slow-motion roar. The floor dropped out beneath me. Everything was TOO BRIGHT AND TOO LOUD. Wow…wow…wow…somebody turn this music off and turn the goddamned lights off…it’s too much…it’s too much…too much…too much…oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit. 

The one-level house suddenly had an upper and a lower level. It wasn’t a house anymore—it was a spaceship casino. A deafening strobe effect pounded my head as if I was tied to the bottom of a subway car as it screamed through the Bronx. Faster than I could blink, images and sounds flew by like neon shrapnel. I was being munched alive by a giant digital machine, a computer- screen wonderworld where my identity was pulverized and pasted into a cold, endless tapestry. Pieces of myself were chopped up and spat back with epileptic speed.

I was being smashed down and torn apart and fused with “the one” against my will. I was separated from myself and could observe my identity stolen and broadcast on the Jumbotron screen of existence. Even my voice had become digitized and sounded as if I was speaking into an electric fan.

A crushed pile of plastic chips. Utterly synthetic. Bland virtual-reality mazescapes, the triumph of math over feeling. Dead flat cybernetic soullessness. Mechanical insect brain. The only emotion left was the most primitive one—fear.

I was a biology-class frog, my brain severed from my spinal column, pinned down in a steel tray, unable to move or feel.

Suddenly all was quiet and eternal. All the colors were burned to ash. Cold, dark space and emotionless planets. A dull grey orb surrounded by hissing blackness. Many things are deader than we’d imagined.

Rearing my woozy head, I realized where I was. I just saw shadows of other humans. No one was stirring. The music had stopped and the lights were off. A James Brown bobble-head doll on the table next to me reflected the middle-of-the-night moon rays and radiated cold, sadistic, voodoo death.

I squeezed my girl. I hovered over her as she stood downtown in the city where I met her…I saw where she fit in my life’s thread, all the events that led up to meeting her and winding up here, lost in a K-hole. We both huddled against a blizzard of blackness.

She said she had to leave. She had to go. Had to get out of there. She stood up and I reached after her. Don’t go. As bad as it is here, it’s worse out there. She took two steps and collapsed on the floor.

I stood up. I looked down at my feet, which seemed to be only three or four inches below my chin. On the floor beneath me was the unconscious Mr. Spectacles with a Mongoloid grin.

I began vomiting. On the couch. On the floor. On the doorknob while walking outside. On the rock garden. Power-puking until all I could taste was my own stomach acids and the rank chemical ketamine taste. My eyes were watering, my foggy breath shallow.

My girl and I sat out in the carport in thirty-five-degree December rain for a half-hour, feeling no cold. Every time I opened my eyes to focus, I saw three of everything swirling around kaleidoscopically.

She finally managed to call a cab. Vomit rose in my throat the whole way. At a stop light, I opened the door and sprayed gut juice onto the asphalt.

“Don’t do Special K,” I mumbled to the driver as he pulled up to my building.”

I FELT A SPOOKY MALAISE for the next week. Everything seemed dead or in the process of dying. Cheap computer-generated TV ads and my rattling kitchen-stove fan threatened to suck me back down into the K-hole.

Researching ketamine on the Internet, I discovered that the recommended powder dose is a small “bump” rather than the twin peaks I inhaled. One study determined that users experience memory loss and “mild schizophrenia” for days after ingesting it. I also learned that Special K can induce seizures and cause severe brain damage in epileptics and left-handers.

I’m left-handed and mildly epileptic.

Thanks, Dr. Buzz.

KETAMINE WAS INVENTED IN 1962 as a safer alternative to PCP, the drug of bloodthirsty psycho legend. Its molecular structure is almost identical to that of its scarier older brother.

Ketamine was employed as an anesthetic during the Vietnam War and is still being used on house pets and children worldwide. Its painkilling properties are so powerful, it’s used in burn trauma and for post-amputation stump pain.

Along with PCP, DXM, and nitrous oxide, ketamine belongs to a class of drugs called “dissociatives,” so named because the user experiences a clear split between ego and body. Physicians refer to such a hallucinogenic near-death state as an “emergence reaction.”

Some people find the blotting out of self to be euphoric, an erasure of all self-consciousness; others, like me, find it nightmarish and run screaming back into themselves.

After media horror stories of its use as a “date-rape drug,” the Feds finally declared ketamine illegal in 1999. You can still buy it over the counter in Mexico, which is where Dr. Buzz procured his stash.

Ketamine’s most ardent spokesman was the neurophysiologist John Lilly who invented the isolation tank in the 1950s. The films Day of the Dolphin and Altered States are based on Lilly’s writings and experiences. Lilly is perhaps best known for his extensive studies trying to decipher dolphin communication patterns. What’s not as well-known is that he was a lifelong K addict rumored at one point to be injecting himself with ketamine once an hour twenty times daily for the better part of a year.

After enough time surfing the K-hole with dolphins (he never gave K to dolphins but claimed he once dosed one with acid), Lilly started believing that the gentle cetaceans were intermediary entities between humans and the space-alien agents of the “Earth Coincidence Control Office (ECCO).” In the 1970s, he went so far as to warn President Gerald Ford that the dolphins could save us from ECCO. Lilly once told a reporter:

Dolphins have personalities and are valuable people.…But what about their spiritual life? Can they get out of their bodies and travel?…I suspect that they’re all ready to talk and carry on with us if we are not so blind. So we open up pathways to them with ketamine, LSD, swimming with them, falling in love with them, and them falling in love with us. 

In short, John Lilly was insane, and ketamine probably played a role in his cognitive unspooling. He spent his life in and out of the funny farm.

Marcia Moore, a wealthy heiress and astrologer, was another ketamine cheerleader. She wrote a 1978 book called Journeys into the Bright World, which included this eager endorsement of falling down the K-hole:

If captains of industry, leaders of nations could partake of this love medicine the whole planet might be converted into the Garden Of Eden… 

On a frigid night early in 1979, Moore climbed into a tree, injected ketamine, dozed off, and froze to death.

The creepiest endorsement of ketamine, and the one which came closest to emulating my experience, is by David Woodard, described as a “requiem composer and a Dream Machine fabricator.” His essay “The Ketamine Necromance” includes this psychotic passage:

Although ketamine is a drug administered and experienced by living beings, the necromantic communications facilitated by its use tend to benefit the dead, offering their spirits a tantalizing portal through which they may experience the world of the warmblooded. Perhaps the dead are desperately clustering around an elusive window they have been chasing down for five or six thousand years of gnashing, burning, excruciating torment. Perhaps one of them would manage to claw his way into the ketamine user’s fleshy, nubile brain for a 56- minute respite. Such communication seems a match of spirits—at times fencing, at others playing mah-jongg or a game of decapitate the endless row of tractor drivers or amputate the handicapped. In a ketamine experience, you are likely to become a subatomic particle sniffing at the ominous butt of nuclear war, the pinnacle of NDE-driven necromantic glory and the greatest hope of all dead spirits that are not enjoying themselves. 

I SAW DR. BUZZ AT A CLUB about a month later, at a point when he’d been shooting Special K in his ass every night for seven straight weeks. He asked me if I wanted to do it again.

No more Ku Klux Ketamine for me.

Despite all the psychonautical jibberjabber about ketamine’s satori-inducing potential, or its application as a pharmaceutical biofeedback machine, or even its use in helping the dolphins save the Earth from ECCO, all it taught me is this:

I don’t want to die.