Going out with my friend Saira who I've known basically since the end of highschool got us talking about my friends from that period…. like the daughter of the Pentecostal minister who stuck to anal sex to “stay a virgin”, the midget with the silver pants, and the pear shaped boy. Anyway, retelling the stories objectively I think one could draw the conclusion that I was not very nice to my art class friends back then (an incorrect conclusion, honest).
First there was Jane. I think she might have been a preacher's kid as well, but either way she was very devout and serious about being a good Christian girl (of the Charismatic sort; they were both into speaking in tongues). The art she made was very safe stuff. I don't remember it very clearly but in a haze I'm seeing unicorns and rainbows. What I do remember is taking a few bottles of paint and randomly pouring them all over one of her senior year projects, proclaiming, “there you go, now it's art!”
Oh, and I'd also splashed paint all over her formerly lily white smock to “help her look like an artist”. The irony is that not only was I not punished or even scolded in any way, but I received an A+, with my highschool art year was publicly dedicated to “the effect of drug use on creative expression”. Seriously, how the school put up with it I don't know.
I remember sitting in the cafeteria across the table from the other Christian girl I mentioned earlier. She was wearing a pale blue full-length conservative dress (her father was a minister who would later be defrocked in a prostitution scandal) and drinking a cranberry juice. For no reason at all, I picked up the bottle and poured the red liquid all over the dress she was wearing and she ran out crying.
Later at York University (from which I was almost expelled for attempted murder) my partner in crime and I met another sheltered Christian girl. She was a member of one of those cults that doesn't let its youth members go out and socialize with pagans and all that… One night she broke that rule and we climbed up onto the roof of one of the dorms and put a large dose of LSD into her eager open mouth. At first she enjoyed the experience, but after a few hours become despondent about her life and started talking about suicide. We climbed down off the roof to get a video camera so we could film her plunging to her death, but by the time we had everything set up, she was no longer in quite as self-destructive a mood.
I did a lot of acid back then…
I sold LSD a decade ago for the same reason that I “sell BME” now. I never looked to make money as a drug dealer. I just wanted other people to try something that I genuinely believed in. The business was secondary to achieving the missionary goal: build a strong business around something you care about to help it grow. I'm not sure that I even could sell or promote something I didn't believe in personally.
Too bad for the mainstream that the stuff I believe in is kind of wacky!
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