the timboucher experience

I remember the main thing I was thinking about on my magical journey home last night was about how there’s something about being stoned, something about how your brain functions while it’s going on, which - to me - seems like the natural order of things, but which is repressed in daily life. Sometimes by people outside of you intentionally, by forcing you into games and rules and phony goals and shit. And then sometimes by yourself, where you choose to turn off, to shut down and densensitize yourself, cause it seems easier in the short term to not have to go your own way, make your own decisions, and live life following your deeper stronger intuitive wisdom. Maybe this is my hang-up though. Maybe it’s just what comes to me/comes outta me when I get stoned, cause its on my mind to begin with.

And you know, my impression is not that “drugs make you think different and better.” Instead, I think this sort of thinking is inherent in you at all times, and that all a drug like pot does is loosen the barriers between you and it. You don’t need it to get there, and you don’t need it to stay there or to incorporate it into your life. I think Andrew Weil says pretty much the same thing in his book the Natural Mind.

I remember this one time I got stoned with John and Emma in Baltimore, and we were listening to Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, and I was stoned outta my gourd by the time the first song came on, “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” which is the one that has the refrain “Everybody must get stoned.” And I remember going on and on about how they weren’t just lyrics, or they weren’t about partying or whatever, they were instructions to a generation, saying that everyone needed to try out these drugs so that they could see what was missing from their life and consciousness. But I’m sure I wasn’t even as coeherent as that when I was jabbering about it. That may have been the same evening that I started muttering about the “mystical relationship between monkeys and plants.” Ahhh, those were good times.

In me, I have noticed a steady progression from the first time I got “high,” where I didn’t really get what was happening, and where after I came back to my ordinary state, what I had been and where I had visited while stoned seemed like a million miles away from me. But I have noticed since then that the two worlds are drawing ever closer, and this is a really good thing because it means that I’m closer and closer to being able to “get there” without any stimulus beyond my own mind.

I remember walking home last night, taking these deep breaths of the cold air, in which my mouth and eyes would open up really wide. And then I would hold them, and walk and walk for what seemed like a ridiculously long amount of time. And I didn’t need another breath, and the extra oxygen just circulated deep through me. And I would think to myself, “Remeber this. Remember what you are.” And they were notes to myself to be able to find my way back later on. Oh shit, and I just remembered that I was thinking about how oxygen is an intoxicant to our bodies and minds, and that normally we breathe fairly shallow breaths… the whole thing was brought on because when I was taking these huge breaths and holding them, the way my mouth would widen was into this huge smile, because it was like the best shape to take oxygen in or something. And that made me think about laughing, and how laughing is one of the best things you can do for yourself, and that people who laugh all the time are smarter and better than people who don’t. I really believe that. But anyway, yeah, there was more to all this, but the details escape me at the moment.

Anyway, the moral of the story is breathe deep, let it feed your brain. Laugh, because its one of the best things you can do for yourself. Smoke pot, and when you do, leave a trail of breadcrumbs for yourself, so that when you’re all done, you can follow it back and incorporate that kind of thinking and insight into your normal waking life.

>> End communication

• Animals Sealed in Stone
• Queer Eye for the asleep guy
• The Sword and the Stone
• Stone Soup: Co-operation Amid Scarcity
• Laughing all the way to the bank