I picked the wrong time to quit sniffing glue.

that's one of my favorite lines from a movie. But it looms real at the moment.

HERE

I'll be living very close to Albufeira and my goodness, would that I had found it earlier. Insert laughter.

When I first started getting high, all of my experiences were intensely spiritual, as was my lifestyle. I would fast before a trip. I would often chant throughout, or read The Way of Life all through; thinking I was imprinting the words upon the very fiber of my being.

Moving on to Woodstock, N.Y. I had a macrobiotic restaurant and lived in a teepee for two years through every season. It got to where I and my friend Michael Green would go down and bathe in the stream naked in the winter morning, walking there barefoot in the snow.

I often walked 5 or 6 miles toward work before someone picked me up. I didn't drive then. It was 3 miles through the woods in Riverby Estates, Wittenberg just to get to the highway. And all down the highway and upon the forest floor my feet would strike the ground while my chant to Amitabha continued. I believed I was changing the Earth beneath; resonating to it's coming Edenic transformation. Mostly what was being changed was me. I didn't know that though.

Later I got a spiritual/occult bookstore in tandem with the restaurant. It was cater-corner to it on Tinker Street. Then I got a house and my friend Peter turned me on to coke. I went from being a saddhu to a dancing sanyasin in Krishna's bountiful garden; if you catch my Gopi allusion. Of course you drink when you snort.

We don't notice things that happen to us on a slow grade. You don't have the beginning yesterday as reference to the attrition of falling tomorrows. It's like aging, or a plant coming out of the Earth. Lines don't suddenly appear on the face, but eventually you see them. One day the plant is taller than you are. When your nature grows coarse it doesn't set off flashing lights. Of course your companions and environment change to accommodate your behavior.

Oh, I don't doubt I went on too long. The things I used to do with an arcane solemnity turned to a recreational repetition. You don't know you're going down the toilet bowl as you circle the rim. Just one day something happens that never happened before. Further on down the road that event has become commonplace. Then another thing happens that never happened before and that becomes commonplace. You can't figure out why your luck changed. But it wasn't your luck that changed, it was you.

You change your environment instead of your behavior. Sooner or later you're gonna crash and burn; maybe you do The Phoenix, maybe you don't.

You come out of it and you stay away for a good while. But somehow you find your way back. You're not having spiritual experiences anymore though, but at least they are strange enough to accommodate your hungry imagination. You crash and burn again, but not like before. This scenario repeats itself until...even more strangely, now you can take it or leave it and the bad shit doesn't happen. You know this is rare. You've been told that.

But the enjoyment just isn't in it. You've gotten to this place where you can actually watch it work inside you and pull the leash. But the thrill is gone. And one thing hasn't changed. It still takes awhile to get back to the place you were when you were meditating and the morning woke smiling and you could hear the good voice that went away as soon as you got high. you realized you weren't getting high. You were repressing the best portion of yourself to avoid a higher destiny. You certainly weren't the Lone Ranger.

Finally, you tell yourself that there's really no point to it if you are getting higher straight than you've ever been when you were high. You're getting these trembling surges and shaker-like jolts of ecstasy, real ecstasy. And you know it's going to get better. You've even started pounding on the ground like you used to; you're doing the same chant- only you've learned a few tricks about that. And life just runs like the river of milk across the land of honey.

The best part of it is that all of the dreams and ambitions you once had don't mean anything now. You wonder why you ever thought it would be a good idea to have a cloud of mosquito-people buzzing around your head. You've found Cold Mountain, just where Gary Snyder said it would be- even if he was only translating- and you found you could sleep by the creek and purify your ears.

You realize how funny it is that the whole thing took place inside your head. You realize you could indeed be a butterfly dreaming that you are a man. All that, first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is stuff turned out to be true. Imagine that. Are sure as you always thought you were you weren't entirely sure.

Stuff just goes on around you, outside you, but you could be anywhere. You don't have an age anymore or a particular point of arrival but you do notice that the trail inside is going around tighter corners; not that you can see corners when there are no edges.

What happens then? What happens at the point where you are obliged to stand still because you have turned around inside the moment and you can't proceed any further. Some say it expands outward from you into the limitless. Some say that a pressure now forces you up a column of light. Whatever it is it will be personal, not business.

Then you find out you are going to be living in the most drug liberal environment this side of Amsterdam. Surely it figures. But the thing is, no one really stops anything until they really want to. Sometimes there just isn't anymore energy left for it. As long as the fire has to rage...as long as it takes to burn away the appetite to act out on the telepathic invasion of your defenseless youth; well, that's how long it takes.

I haven't any idea of why I wrote this. I saw that article while I was researching driving restrictions across France, Spain and Portugal. I've got my new Touran and there were factors to consider. It turned out I couldn't go with my friend Chris and the whole trip was changed. Now Susanne and I will drive down together and then she'll fly back to finish up things.

It's odd. Chris has long hair and just got busted by the Swiss for 40 kilos of buds. He'd have stood out physically. Susanne stands out physically but in a far more charming way.

About ten times in the last two weeks I found myself in a position to wonder about what I would do about something I had to do something about. Every time a voice came into my head and said, "why not let me handle it." The first two times some very remarkable things occurred. And each time it got handled near immediately after, better than I might ever have done. None of them were crisis decisions, just life process. But it has been uncanny nonetheless.

So it's not a surprise now; wasn't a surprise when somehow I knew I wouldn't be going with Chris. It wasn't a surprise to find I'd be leaving a few days later than 'I' had planned. I just said, "Sure".