My first LSD trip (also an unfinished short story, indie label new-wave folk song, anthologized beat-revival poem and, occasionally, a way I begin sentences) was extraordinarily vivid, a perpetual ethereal slide show of Magritte and Dali and Picasso crossing brushes but somehow harmoniously dispensing uncommon gifts that were personal to me only across the same broad infinite canvas in a way that swirled around me like a cloud of sparkling cotton candy quickly consumed by my gaping, spastic neuronal receptors until saturation and ultimately evaporation, which settled and subsequently contracted into this stunning rebirth, an ever expanding mushroom cloud of radiant butterflies whose collective magnificence rose high into the cloudless sky until a seemingly unwavering threshold was thwarted by an aggressive vortex that thunderously consumed the rather fragile pink-tinted atmospheric layer and gave way to the comparatively hard anthracite hue of upper stratosphere, sizzling the remainder of a fragmented ozone, albeit fleetingly, fluorescent streamers rocketing, blazing, into a shower of stunning incandescence that fractured the earth’s crust in a fashion dramatic enough to elicit a flash of self-actualization profound yet still so brief that existentialism became just another illusory bit of triviality incapable of engendering any recognizable reference points with which there was no time to connect, anyway, as psychedelia came back to me in an ostensible peak that swirled frenetically, almost nauseatingly, around the thinning and ever malleable core that had at one time been construed as a soul, and the blurriness of the spinning axis of this newfangled world had pushed me all the way to a skyscraping edge that dissolved into emptiness, into no definable edge at all, and I was suspended in a time zone, my body paralyzed, my eyes darting, cartoon-crossing, rolling back into my skull, high above the small black speck of rabbit hole that was in fact unfathomably vast with infinite depth; and finally, mercifully, the tenuous suspension finally shattered around me, dusting away into the thin air into which I plunged, ever faster, although at times I was yanked to a stop, abruptly, abrasively, and at these random, intermittent  withdrawals from my descent, I absorbed an (at first alarming, though progressively enchanting with each subsequent pause) inversion of senses, rich primary colors prancing about in fluid amorphousness, too accessible to be nonobjective but rather abstract as each pulsating color transmogrified into manic animations and scatty rhythms and fresh flora scents while some far off stereo in the parallel universe from which I’d been taken hostage hours earlier, traveled in sonic waves to the arches of my bare feet, tapping lightly, almost coyly, and then suddenly impatiently, sharply, and spiked the nerves in these foreign appendages that were still somehow recognizable as my own feet, igniting these fast winding jolts of electricity up my legs and into the tributaries of my bloodstream until my mouth became filled with the sweet taste of caramel, the dry roof and sticky insides of my cheeks like that thin layer of caramel skin that sheaths the large granny smiths at the grocery stores in the summertime, and any remaining simplistic perceptions of music turned over with a brisk force that was too much to absorb all at once, the infiltration prohibitively complex the way it scintillated my senses in a unison that rendered any heretofore distinct viscera mere illusory bastards of an enormous conflagration that I could already sense would be shoveled into the overflowing bin of ineffability to which much of the experience had already been relegated—phantoms forever, at least in this lifetime….and while my writing will never convey the ineffable experience of the trip that words can never give proper justice, neither would the subsequent six hundred or so attempts to capture that same initial visceral ecstasy, and the numerous attempts, most in vain but some very well on the verge, accumulated in a peculiar but apparently permanent neuronal rhythm that guarantees myself and a small but ever expanding network of psychiatric nurses (many are going back to school just so they can keep up with the pace of the reeling psychedelic ticker tape that is my brain) an infinitely stocked and gigantic Pez dispenser (it’s already been delivered, an 8 foot tall pink flamingo that mechanically bows at the touch of a remote and opens its beak to dispense a bite-sized brick that is essentially an amalgam of Paroxetine, Clonazepam and Haloperidol) and—to name one of many consequences that have been documented as a consensus of the tripping collective—rendered Pink Floyd’s once disarming conceptual tour de force double album “The Wall” a rather banal high school musical soundtrack blaring through Bose speakers in locked suburban bedrooms with black-lit posters of Jefferson Airplane double-taped to the popcorn painted ceilings under which the suburban teens masturbated to the bad girl posturing of Grace Slick, even though it was over twenty years later and the poster should instead have read Jefferson Starship, a carefully studio crafted still shot of Grace Slick, her deep smoker’s wrinkles smoothed over with too much make up that was toweled off hastily as she burned rubber out of the inconsequential PR firm’s lot in her Guards Red Porsche 968 cab blaring “We Built This City On Rock & Roll,” the eight tiny Blaupunkt speakers throbbing her black supple leather until the tautly woven stitching could no longer withstand the rather gauche soundtrack filling its cabin and the stitching popped and unraveled into a mess of loose threads that befuddled even “pre-owned” car vet Little Nicky at the European auto boutique in North Beach, his overtanned and trembling caffeinated hands up in the air, his eyes parallel to the overcast San Fran sky, pleading, “Why, why, why!” and angrily adding,  “Figlio di puttana!”

Yet the automobile managed to attract more attention than Jefferson Starship’s latest effort, whose rumored working title was “Ikea Kitchen Islands Formed By The Sands of Internet-Purchased Mood Enhancers From New Zealand,” a rambling code for the comparatively laconic but ultimately shelved quadruple CD high-concept album (conceived initially by Don Simpson, whose 70k/month drug habit flopped him into a dirt nap before he could whip the seemingly hopeless album into the same type of commercial success of “Top Gun,” a project that had limped around like a three legged homeless dog before Simpson came to the rescue, its theme song penned and sung by Neo-Nazi hardcore artist Kenny Loggins, and whose overall theme was described by fledgling director Quentin Tarantino as homoerotic to the extent that we may as well have been watching jet-powered gigantic cocks whiz about erectly in the don’t ask don’t tell Air Force culture on which the film is based) entitled “Tripping The Millenial Light Phantasmagoric,” which failed to arouse a single flaccid auditory hair cell inside that small, windowless, soundproofed room (where Britney and Lindsay and even Don Johnson have been kept for days on end without food or water when such Draconian punishment was warranted) adjacent to the janitor’s closet on the fifth floor of Capitol Records on an unusually torrid 95 degree Fahrenheit January day that would compel a swarm of ghetto birds to follow the make-up smeared wrinkled mug of Grace as she wove through congested Sunset traffic, clipping the bumpers and side-strips of so many other cars along the way, and she continued to weave through the congestion and swerved over the medians until the road was clear enough for her to hit the throttle with all that pent up angry energy that then rocketed the Guards Red 968 into the fiery horizon blaze that somewhat obscured the grandeur of the Chateau Marmont, where John Belushi’s speedballed corpse was tagged and zipped and shoved into an ambulance on a sunny March day in 1982, and even more obscured was the rambling geometric architecture of glass and white and pink stucco fitted neatly into well guarded Hollywood Hills enclaves, and for poor Grace, who hadn’t dropped since like the Indian summer of’73 but still had sporadic acid flashbacks released from her prickly old spine, the vision was simply too much to bare (even through the dark glass of the $980 dollar Dolce & Gabbana shades that looked uncannily like the ten dollar Blue-Blockers my grandpa sports while making blatant sexual overtures to the old ladies at his assisted living facility):  homes were consumed by the unusually hot January Southern California sun and melted like ice cream castles that began gushing like avalanches down the hills and into the idling traffic of Sunset, and Jags and Bentleys and Porsches and Ferraris flipped high into the air above the palm trees that bent under the pressure and finally snapped, and down the boulevard gushed a river of rainbow-colored ice cream (just two weeks shy of the West Hollywood Gay Pride Parade) that carried all that had been lost:  long blonde hair extensions, palm pilots, wrist watches with dinner plate sized diamond-encrusted faces, indistinguishable 8×10 black and whites, unfinished movie scripts about superhero strippers and talking bananas and killer Chihuahuas, and one could also see penis pumps and mangled coyotes and large chunks of canyon rock, and Grace Slick’s pupils were so dilated that her eyes were raven black, and most of the field reporters had arrived too late and failed miserably as they, too, drowned in the mess that was by most accounts perceived rather than factual on an otherwise uneventful January evening in Los Angeles in 1998.