Best of 2015: Drugs/Reality

I am pretty much always confused about my body-- its contents, its boundaries.
Where should it go? Why is it clumsier in a winter coat and how do I compensate for that?

Language roots my reality, imposes order. Language allows me to organize and navigate more reliably, creating meaning, albeit slippery in the world around me.
This is why I largely avoid marijuana.
The significance of this decision was reinforced at the end of 2015, when I spent a terrifying night altered by a slim teaspoon of THC cheesecake.

The change happened gradually.
I was drawing with friends in a brightly lit kitchen, listening to music. There were snacks, probably good ones. Jokes were made.
But slowly everything took on a more sinister hue.
The record was scary and sounded very big. My friends looked outlandish.
I no longer had the ability to engage with them in the ways I relied on. My words were shutting down, overwhelmed by other senses--unreliable senses.
Terrifying senses.

With the remaining scraps of my verbal faculties, I asked to be led somewhere to lie down.
A friend took me to his bed then retreated from the room, where I was left to remember what Friend and Room meant.
I felt distress at a departing benevolent presence, but by that time I had largely dissolved into a series of unbounded chemical reactions. I recognized that my matter was bleeding into the molecules around me. My vision was darkening. Death would come soon.

I approached death without fear or sentiment, understanding at once that there was no god, just the gristle and chemistry inside me and a senseless, disordered series of words moving through it. Familiar terms cycled through my mind, rootless and unrelenting. Then everything feel silent.

The next morning I awoke. I asked myself if I still liked coffee, Now That I Was Different.
I decided I would try to.
I met with a Friend. We had a plan to draw, and it seemed important to keep this Plan, that we'd written together on our Calendars with Pens.
I don't indulge in psychedelic art. It is off brand, best left to the Alex Grays and Fred Tomasellis, but I allowed myself to make one drawing before putting this experience decisively behind me.
It is pictured below.
The drawing is stupid, pot is drugs, reality is fleeting and very frightening.
Trust nothing.
Happy New Year everyone.