The Damned Lies Project

Wherein we go west like young men.

When we last left our intrepid heroes, there were three of us just beginning to trip balls.  We had inadvertently discovered the destination for our quest:  Toy Joy, the kitchy toy store not far from campus.  Our next step became getting there.

Toy Joy was theoretically within walking distance, but it was not an idle walk.  Twenty to thirty minutes for a normal person, depending on the speed you walked and how urgent you were to get there.  For drug users, such a time estimate was impossible; it would be a feat worth talking about if we even arrived at our destination.  There was a route we could have taken through the heart of campus which perhaps would have been more direct.  This would have taken us across campus, through looping paths, steps up and down, either plunging through or circumventing campus buildings.  That could have been quicker, but it was a less interesting walk.  We particularly did not want to walk through any buildings we had classes in while on acid, just for the poor associations in our drug-addled minds.

The route we took was more L shaped.  Five blocks to the west, then about ten north.  The north trip would take us along the Drag, a long stretch of lights and sound.  This would be far more interesting than plowing through campus, especially when said light and sound would be augmented by our current mental states.

We set out the west exit of Jester dorm, walking down the steps with a sense of purpose.  It was still dinner time, so there were a fair amount of people on the street and the sun was setting.  This again was different from previous trips, all taken at night time where pedestrian density was less and far more used to nighttime revelers.  We each did our best to not look suspicious, to look like stupid college students rather than stupid college students on drugs.  In retrospect, I’m not sure anyone would have been able to tell the difference. Read the rest of this entry »

The titular world in The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman is similar in many ways to the United States in the eighteenth century.  The East is a place of cities, universities, learning, and clearly defined things.  But the West is a frontier of lawlessness, small towns, philosophical movements, gunslingers and railroads.  But it is not our world.  Towns have different names and it has been in this state for centuries.  The West is more than just lawless; at the farthest frontier reality itself is ill-defined and strange.  The Folk roam the land, strange and mysterious, unable to die.  But by far, the main difference is the centuries old war between the Gun and the Line. Read the rest of this entry »

Wherein three friends take drugs and start a trip that will change the world… or not.

Basquiat typically received his drugs by mail.  This sounds stupid, but it was true.  He’d receive Fedex deliveries of a sheet or two of paper with some art on it.  Each sheet was already dipped in acid, so he’d simply cut up the sheets and sell each small square as a single hit of acid.  I don’t know who sent them or how that relationship was set up; sometimes it was better not to ask.

During the height of my brief drug career, he got something a little different.  Instead of sending a sheet, he had gotten them to send the liquid itself.  Why they changed it up, I was never sure – I think he just was curious and wanted to try the liquid himself.  We weren’t bold enough to actually drink the liquid – the amount of liquid needed for a typical hit was miniscule.  Besides a mere overdose, there were other dangers: acid can be absorbed through any mucous membrane.  So spill it on your hand and touch your nose, mouth, etc and you could get more than you bargained for.  No, he took the liquid and dipped his own sheets.  But I was part of the experiment he was conducting – what was freshly dipped acid like?  Acid sheets lost their potency over time, so the question was, how powerful was a sheet that was freshly dipped? Read the rest of this entry »

Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser are two iconic characters in the history of fantasy.  Before Lord of the Rings, before Elric, before Jordan, Eddings, Goodkind, Martin or the others there were these two rogues and the dirty city of Lankhmar.  Fafhrd is a tall blond barbarian from the North.  The Grey Mouser is a shorter, slimmer man, skilled with his rapier and a minor amount of magic.  They are rogues, thieves, swashbucklers and adventurers.  Rather than being the larger-than-life of Conan, they are closer to real men.  They banter back and forth as they steal, slay monsters, drink, and flirt with women.  Created by author Fritz Leiber, they are the most notable characters of fantasy that modern readers may have never heard of. Read the rest of this entry »

Wherein I write a post that will probably get me on some watch list somewhere

It was in college that I experimented with drugs.  College is the typical time for this stuff.  I have a certain distrust of someone who doesn’t admit to experimenting with something during college.  Surely they tried something, they just won’t admit it, which is provokes the distrust.  Come on, just be forthright and admit you experimented with girl drinks until your banana daiquiri habit got out of control and you had the Great Girl Drink Detox of ’97.

This is not to say that I was using hard drugs.  I was no Burroughsian junky staring at their shoes for hours on end before riding around for a fix.  I put as many hats on the bed as I wanted, I wasn’t so poor I had to do anything for a fix, my classes did not suffer, and I had a life outside drug use.  It was just something to make the weekends interesting.

Primarily, I tried acid, aka LSD.  Oh yeah, I tried marijuana like every other college student who didn’t have a stick up their ass the size of Gibraltar, but I didn’t like it.  It gave me a headache and made me tired.  Phish fans who got excited at the title of this post – suck it, we’re not serving your kind here.  King Crimson fans – thanks for stopping by, please stay awhile. Read the rest of this entry »

A secret international conspiracy of anarchists is threatening the world.  To combat that, a new intellectual force of British police is created to infiltrate the anarchist conspiracy.  Gabriel Syme, a poet, is recruited for this police force.  Through a strange course of events, he is able to infiltrate the local anarchist group and is elected to the post of Thursday.  With his new title, he is sent to the top-level anarchist gathering.  There he meets five other anarchists, each under the names of the days of the week.  The group is led by a massive and mysterious man known only as Sunday.  They plan an atrocious act of anarchism for the following weekend, then disperse, leaving Syme to somehow stop this plot before it happens.

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G.K. Chesteron is a strange surrealist novel of identities.  All the anarchists are told that the most perfect way to disguise themselves is to disguise themselves as anarchists.  Most people who call themselves anarchists are full of bluster but no bite, and the world at large accepts them with a mocking smile when out of sight.  Those that try to hide themselves, find that their secretive ways and plans tend to attract the most notice.  People are worried about a secret anarchist but not a public one.  So to hide as the most perfect anarchist is to discuss it openly, as Sunday’s group does on the terrace of a restaurant overlooking a busy square under full observation of waiters.  But this starts the almost schizophrenic chain of identities.  Syme is a poet who is a police man who is disguised as an anarchist who is pretending to be an anarchist among other anarchists.  Things get even more confusing when he hunts down one of his fellow members of the week to find out he is also a police agent pretending to be an anarchist… Read the rest of this entry »