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26 aug 06 "do you like to puff the magic dragon?" i did maybe once every two weeks for a year or so when i was 20-ish, but now very, very infrequently. if i puff the magic dragon twice or more in a week, i start to get paranoid and dellusional. i remember one time i became convinced, after puffing and watching the weather channel, that the government was attempting to cover up the the fact that the weather was getting more dangerously severe every year. i then grabbed my knife and my passport, and started stalking around the house, making gossamer plans to leave for canada. another time, i became convinced that my computer was spying on me, and 1) turned it off, 2) unplugged it, 3) unplugged the coaxial cable, 4) unplugged the modem, and 5) pulled the computer desk three feet away from the wall. most people tell me that the magic dragon makes them sleepy and slow-minded, but i find that the opposite is true for me -- it produces racing thoughts and ideas that seem earth-shattering-ly brilliant at the time, but later turn out to be dumb and blasé. also, i barely sleep for at least one, and maybe two nights afterwards. i'm 99% sure i'd score higher on an IQ test while feeling the effects, if i didn't decide that the real test was to see if the taker was smart enough to draw "big bird" on the answer sheet. there's a real danger of my becoming literally insane and doing stupid things, which has happened. i remember one instance while visiting my trout "girlfriend" lauren up at vassar college (there was a lot of puffing going on there). in a dorm room and while under the influence, lounging around with a few other kids, i suddenly stood up and shrieked "i am owl semen!" and then, "i am dracula's scrotum!" and i really thought i was, at least on a metaphoric level. i might still, but i'm not going to make a big deal about it. some of the insights i mentioned aren't totally stupid or wrong, but they often turn out to be truisms. the ones that aren't are so unimportant, uninteresting, impractical, and inapplicable to anything that one is sort of embarrassed about excitedly scribbling them down in the first place. here's an example i once found in my day planner: 1) GET A DOG on the same page were instructions to invest money in the san franscisco mass transit system. listening to music, looking at artwork, tasting food, etc -- any sort of sensory stimulus -- seems that much more pleasurable, exciting, detailed, complex, and meaningful. furthermore, what you're drawing on a paper or playing on the guitar at the time seems brilliant (just like the "insights"), but later seems banal, if you re-examine it or listen to the recording. fact is, the only thing that was "different" during your experience was the heightening of the senses -- puff doesn't generate any new abilities, other than those that might be implied by known physiological changes. for instance, the racing thoughts imply "creativity", in that a lot of stuff is going on in your brain and it feels necessary to get it out. however, the quality of the created bits is often questionable. i've also found that my guitar fingers get clumsier. the change would be permanent -- ie, what one was playing on the guitar would be brilliant and ground-breaking if one could stay in that state forever. but alas, it's not possible -- even for hardcore, daily puffers (of which there are surprisingly many, and sometimes those you would never suspect), the universe doesn't sparkle nearly as much once the novelty wears off. but reality can change for a transient while, which is an interesting concept -- it's like inducing insanity. for the insane, reality is different -- what they experience isn't the same as what the rest of us do. their concept of "the universe", one that is no more or less valid than any other concept of the universe, is radically different. if we equate "god" or the universe with consciousness, then what lies behind their "doors of perception" is something new and awesome. this is why, historically and across cultures, the "insane" (mentally-divergent, if you will) have been revered as shamans of a sort -- they see what no-one else can see. puff produces minor changes in reality -- those i detailed above, plus the desire to eat entire pans of brownies. but there are other dragons who can twist the universe into impossible shapes. it's something to stay away from, in general, i think, although it can be argued that puff and his relatives are the only things that produce a profoundly and totally new experience, outside of 10 years in a zen monastery, which is costly in terms of lost wages. i hope we're talking about the same thing here when we say "puff the magic dragon". it occured to me that you might have meant "administering fellatio". |
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