Getting The Message: Strabismus

"When you get the message, hang up the phone." ~ Alan Watts 

I recently met a man who decided to get healthy and lost over 200 pounds using LSD. Yes, you read that correctly. Lysergic acid diethylamide. Now, I'm not saying that dropping acid is the next big fad diet, but it certainly was a revelation for me. (Did anyone else find it ironic that "diet" is in the name?)

The man's argument was that taking LSD allowed him to reach a higher power and allowed him to reconnect with himself, giving him the peace and confidence within to free himself from an unhealthy lifestyle. What was brilliant about his experience was that he used it to frame an argument for why people abuse drugs and why it can be so damaging. When you get the message for the first time, it is an incredible experience - life changing, mind blowing - like learning you were adopted or your sister is actually your mother. The problem is, like most knowledge, once you know, you can't unknow. Once you get the message, have the experience of receiving it, you can never achieve that experience again. Yet, people yearn to, they want to have the same experience, and this is how they fall into an abusive pattern of drug use. The man's argument was, once you get the message, use it to better your life, use the knowledge for your benefit, instead of trying to get the message over and over again.    

Now, for a long time, I was hugely against drug use. Any drug use. In fact, I am proud of the fact that I have never taken any recreational drugs. But as I've looked into the use of drugs, particularly psychotropic drugs, I've reconsidered my position on the matter. In my opinion, if something enriches your life, if something makes you better, happier, more successful, helps you achieve your goals, to love yourself, than no one can take that away from you, no matter what that thing is. So long as it is used responsibly, as long as you control the message, the knowledge it imparts to you is yours and yours alone. Use it, don't abuse it.          

Strabismus 

I am that blistered opus,

The third eye of a segregated sky

Spilled across the sclera of a wall-eyed dream;

A seed sown into a vein, halfway to the heart,

Screaming for sunlight,

Biting at the bulbs that flicker a bit higher.

I am that patchwork nowhere

Constructed of drought-ridden hopes,

Sucked up through a straw

Protruding from the partially realized lips of a fetus,

A wormhole with exists in boilerplate dimensions,

Furnished with names unpronounceable.

I am a you

That was a me 

That we can't remember;

I am the remainder of a number that no one counted on,

A queue in a cumulonimbus maybe

That was never called.

I am the organelles,

The will-o'-the-wisps that occupy cages of quanta,

Keeping the corners warm

To numb the conscience of a crestfallen chromosome.

I am amness,

Being in the act of becoming,

The has-been of a yet-to-be.

I am when;

I am now;

I am only a memory

Searching for a mind to be cherished in.