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// 2009 - In 2006, I was blasted apart by LSD, went through ego-loss, and then suffered the unknown presence of a movie which was in an adjacent room during my re-integration. Through many of those years I was continuing to consume psychedelics as well as fighting with an opiate addiction, and as I look back on the photographs I took, songs I wrote, I see them as clues, which if I wasn’t afraid, if I’d understood, would have led me to being able to integrate the experience sooner. I felt a continual pull towards televisions, first enshrining one in wax, eventually playing a TV as a musical instrument using audio and video feedback and a magnetic glove. This TV was in a dingy, fly-infested two room apartment in back of town, Morgantown, West Virginia where I spent a year in Hell driving around the crack-addled dealers Mustang and Lil Mustang who would steal from me and then make it up to me when they needed my car, and a neighbor, Jimmy, who was honest and told me to keep away from them. All this time I was going through a “schizophrenic”, doped up nightmare in my apartment, clogging the toilet with a dope-dense shit and cleaning the overflow myself, as well as seeing shadow people and sensing ghosts, I was also driving across Monongalia county with crackheads and felons, trying in vain to help them as I also tried to get my own needs for hillbilly heroin and benzodiazepines met by men who’d been made sociopaths by crack cocaine. At one point, emboldened by hero-in, I refused to take Mustang on his first stop (a crackhouse), before we retrieved my drugs. He then put his hand into his jacket and claimed to have a gun, and I began screaming “Fuck you, pull the fucking gun, I’ll break your broken shoulder!” as his son screamed in the background, “Dad, don’t do that. He’s lying, he’s lying!” Things calmed down and we got our drugs. That same winter I made a costume from a coyote hide, worn on the back, came up over the forehead and covered the eyes, and when a street kid who called himself Wolf came through my apartment, I did psychedelics with him and Lil Mustang while we watched the Holy Mountain. Wolf left wearing my coyote-shaman outfit and never returned. A month or two later, Lil Mustang was sent to a military school. He left 3 days later, claiming he was forced to lift 30 pound bricks over his head for hours on end. I called my Dad once, drunk and raving in our recording studio and he said he’d call the cops. “No, no!” then I wouldn’t be able to get any dope. I was always willing to put the fear out there at random, never to take the help I was offered. I gave these guys constant trust and compassion, expecting that to help, not sober or wily enough myself to understand I was being used, and when I did, the situations got harsh, quick. The father and son duo, Mustang and Lil Mustang, threatened me over the phone repeatedly after I declined to drive them around to any more crackhouses, but thanks to an accidental pocket dial, he heard shotguns being cocked by two of my friends and plans of causing trouble. I heard him yelling in my pocket, and picked up the phone “Don’t do anything to us! Leave us alone!” Never heard from them again after that incident. They were always curious about my TVs and my playing the TV as a musical instrument, and once Lil Mustang took me up to his room, showed me that he’d melted down red candles in pill bottles, “This is how I’m killin myself,” maybe another sociopathic ploy, maybe he really looked up to me and wanted my help. None of that ended up mattering except that now I can look back and write up another incomplete Hell I passed through, and know I won’t go there again, to the corrupt pharmacy 35 winding miles through the cool windy valley, to every waiting room where a doctor might be tricked into giving up some dope, to houses where only a moment of a face was seen and where money sometimes disappeared, to frantic roadside phone calls to scream at dealers and thieves, the gritted teeth, the threats, and between all that, what I believed were magic spells, stolen prayers, triumphant, miraculous music I could’ve taken somewhere, if my spirit hadn’t been pulled a hundred different directions, but mostly to my next fix. Each time I visited Walmart I bought more candles, until the TV was lost in wax, and I never understood any of my fixations, the TV, the Bible pages on the bathroom door, the acronyms, the signposts of anamnesis, of recomposition.
