17

A couple of weeks ago I was seriously fearful that my marijuana habits were undermining the eloquence I’ve been trying to cultivate. I noticed myself forgetting words and stalling in conversations, my memory escaping me on simple tasks of retrieval. I don’t know if this is an actual physiological condition or a symptom of paranoia relating to the auras of vice and shame that surround the practice of habitual smoking, or both, or if the physical/mental distinction is meaningful at all, or if my fears of memory loss are creating that reality, or if I’m actually perfectly okay. But reading that list of possibilities over, that latter option seems hopelessly outnumbered.

An acquaintance of mine once described to me his friend’s dad’s “acid flashback”: he (the dad) was driving on the highway, apparently, when an imaginary horse “fucking jumped out onto the road right in front of him.” and he (the dad) steered sharply away, almost killing himself or someone else accidentally. Upon hearing this I cringed because my acquaintance spoke from ignorance having never used acid himself, and I was skeptical of his claim that residual LSD “stays in your joints,” dormant, ready to activate and fuck up your life at any moment—this struck me as a defensive expression of a fear of the unknown. But another image he employed in his vitriolic assault has remained with me and still haunts me, and that is that the drug “tears holes in your brain”: is this what I have done to my own brain with my own favored venom?

Does each burnt bowl burn a new hole in my neural web like a smoldering cigarette crushed into an antique tablecloth? Would I find the answer by studying the science of anatomy? Of psychology? Of embroidery? Or is the name of the appropriate discipline something I’ve already lost, my vocabulary excised by a condition now impossible for me to ever find, the relevant page in my mental dictionary ripped out and crumpled up and incinerated, a gaping hole in its place?

18

A fantasy for two: listen to Trapped in the Closet high and nude.