Bennies

If I actually had a to-do list, it would fill an online encyclopedia. And if I was almost human, the list should read something like this:
 
1. Buy toilet paper.
2. Price lightbulbs (they’re expensive, y’know?)
3. a. Repair the enormous hole in bedroom wall
or
b. Put a large box in front of hole
4. Put something other than empty bottle of ketchup in refrigerator.
5. Get a job, fucking hippie.
 
But over the past few years, I’ve had incredible difficulty adjusting to life as it’s lived by most humans. I like to think that I prioritize aesthetic concerns over matters of pragmatics. So my hypothetical list would read something like this:
 
1. Steal a car and sell it.
2. Buy acid.
3. Buy Benzedrine.
4. Buy pot.
5. Read anti-ethical and esoteric philosophical texts
 
I’ve always considered being an outlaw as an admirable profession. Well, maybe not admirable, but certainly a necessity in this fucked up society where due to an arbitrary 1879 law on the books, you’re not allowed to carry a chicken across the street in Tuscaloosa. This probably had to do with my complete lack of Protestant work ethic (my parents are Catholic), and even assuming I had any desire to work, I wouldn’t be able to get a job. My only professional experience is as a customer service representative at the Foley’s Ticketmaster outlet and call center, where I spent two weeks until I was fired. During this stint serving the public good and fulfilling my debt to democracy, I added 250% service charges for tickets to naïve customers. Most of them hung up right away, but a few middle-class housewives didn’t balk at the fee when it meant they could finally see Donny and Marie perform at the Denver Coliseum. I set up a Paypal account with Ticketmaster’s name on it and entered the business information in so that it wouldn’t phase the customer on their credit card bill. They finally caught me when the Quality Assurance team spuriously starting monitoring my calls. Technofascists. I would be in litigation hearings right now if I would have shown up for my court date, which I didn’t. So I’m already an outlaw. This doesn’t help the current situation.
 
You might blame my parents for my status as a miscreant, drug-using-and-abusing vagabond. But it’s not their fault, really. A good sperm hath a bad child spawned, or something. I believe existence precedes essence, at least for the most part, so I sort of have to take responsibility for my shitty choices. But I’ve had a lot of fun at the same time. My brother is different than me. He’s supposedly done well for himself in the world, doing this marketing job in New York City. Who the fuck cares? He used to be so interested in philosophy and spirituality, and even that’s bullshit, but he pretended like he was part of the counter-culture and threw it all away for some notion of respectability. He’s a fucking hipster dilettante who can’t even make friends off of his hipness. He holes up in his room and pretends that all of those deep thoughts going on in his brain matter at all.
 
My parents took it pretty easy on me for the most part, since they were hippies. Well, actually, they were beatniks who failed to integrate themselves into the New York School of Poetry with Chuck Olson (not the televangelist, Colson) and those other folks. As anti-establishment as they were, they were really into corporal punishment when I was young, but other than the searing scars left upon my ass and soul by the sting of the belt in our living room (which will require extensive therapy about the fear of being loved roughly two years from now), they were okay. My dad collects all of these cool old Verve records, and my mom cross-stiches William Blake paintings. Sometimes Eve looks more like a walrus, but I’ve heard those patterns are tough to follow.
 
But enough of that Holden Caulfield crap. This isn’t a case study; it’s a memoir. And the best part about this story is that I’m only 26, so in fifty years I get to sell another memoir about writing my first memoir. At least as soon as WordPerfect tells me I’ve written more than two pages. So, I’m going to tell you about my current circumstances.
 
Basically, I’m living in a shitty studio flat that I got my parents to spring for after pulling the whole “Well, I’ll just sleep on the benches with the junkie hobos” spiel. It worked pretty well. The landlord generously furnished the room with a bed and a toilet—no sink. I’ve got a CD player (essential for those moments when I just have to hear that song that reminds me of her, sentimental bullshit) and sheets for the bed. Oh, and the Complete Nietzsche volumes I poetically stole from the library, obviously indicating that I’ve risen above morality and mortality, exploring the vitality of reality. Or it means I was too broke to pick up Why I Write Such Good Books at my local Barnes & Noble.
 
I’ve never really had a teacher like Nietzsche.  No matter how deeply rooted you are in your personal dogma, he will change you in some way, even after reading just one of his books. The man is a contradiction in terms again and again while still drawing you into at least his thought patterns, if not his entire philosophy. Listen to him and draw your own conclusions—it’s important. He writes about the entire world.
 
God, I keep going off on these tangents without actually getting to the point. Basically I’ve been reading him and realizing that I have let the herd morality dictate my life since I was young, with just a few exceptions when there was nothing else I could possibly do. Of course, no one reading this is part of the herd—you’re all ascended masters. At least it’s better for me to write to you assuming that you are, because hopefully someone will read this and understand, either today or 1000 years down the road.
 
So basically, I’m trying to become this Übermensch character. This sounds like a stupid and juvenile idea probably because it is. I mean, it’s blatantly obvious, just evolution. Everyone’s trying to become greater than the civilization before them was, hence striving to be above humanity. But Nietzsche was on of the first to put a label on this concept and consciously strive for that ideal, and by doing so, he either achieved it or helped others achieve it. That’s what his main, partially unstated gripe was: Christendom, basically all of European society at the time, was subscribed to a slave morality that they can never excel because they’re too scared of a little teeth gnashing. I read that book everyone’s talking about, Ulysses, you know, and the part that stuck with me the most was when Buck Mulligan was talking with some Irish dude about whether Stephen Dedalus was going to become a truly great artist. Buck—who’s easily my favorite character—says that Stephen’s been exposed to the dangers of hellfire too much to be the progenitor of a new species, a new creation. I don’t want to fall into that trap, so I’ve tried to get past this idea. I was exposed to it a little too much also, and to get past it, I try to forget about it. Of course, that’s a little antithetical to writing about it all the time, but it has to be discussed, and I’m making the noble sacrifice of writing about it. I’m also trying to get past it by stealing a car, and by now, I’ve hopefully convinced you that I have a genuine metaphysical reasoning behind this quest of petty thievery. What better way of contradicting outmoded moral standards than by self-consciously violating them?
 
You may think that stealing a car to buy drugs isn’t a good reason, that maybe I should try buying necessities with the money I get from selling the car. Or you may shit on my metaphysical quest and suggest not selling the car at all. Usually those kind of people also tell me to go get a job at 7-11.  They’re lumping me in with the lumpenproletariat, and I don’t appreciate it. Do you know how much of a struggle it is to work day-in, day-out just to survive, and how stifling that is? Coming home to TV and Easy Mac? Wait, you might. But if you do, don’t you hate it? Wouldn’t you rather live a different way instead of blindingly and blindly following what your pastors and bosses do? Look, I’m not trying to make myself out to be a hero, but everyone should at least strive to be one in their own ways.
 
So yesterday, I headed to J. Edgar Hoover Memorial Shopping Mall to see what kind of damage I could inflict on the rigid moral structure of my past. The first thing that catches my eye aside from the other gaudy bullshit is an enormous SUV, fully loaded. Not only is it a piece of shit polluting beast, but it has the most nauseating bumper stickers I could possibly imagine on the back. “Support Our Troops: Keep the War Going!,” a Christian fish with four little robot fish swimming behind, Bush ’04, Bush ’00, Dole ’96, all the way back to Nixon ’72 (which someone had obviously taken the time to rip off of another car just to put it on this one). Then on the back, get this: there’s a Garfield plushie stuck to the window and a picture of Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes praying. Okay, that’s fucking it. I can’t deal with this shit anymore.
 
Everyone has a thing, something that makes them tick and strive beyond the misery of their daily existences. Comics are mine. One of the only idyllic experiences I can remember from my childhood was skipping Mass on Sunday and reading the color comics at the breakfast table with my mom sipping coffee and my dad eating pancakes. They were reading ads and sports, respectively (but not respectfully), and I was off in my own world reading Calvin & Hobbes and Foxtrot and laughing manically to myself. I tried Bloom County and Doonesbury too, and even though I didn’t understand the adult jokes, I desperately wanted to. The surreal landscapes, bizarre characters—I ate them up. I was obsessed with them for a long time, convincing my parents to buy $10 collections of them. After I read a few in one night, I was reprimanded to ration the books and told that I shouldn’t read so fast because they were very expensive. They should have just taken me to the library.  So I would read the first half of the book (and a little more) the first night and then the second part the next night. A stuffed tiger showed me the importance of imagination and hard work instead of my parents, and I’m not just being smarmy. 
 
And now, this fucking SUV had my counter-culture demiurgical hero Calvin on his knees, sanctimoniously praying—praying!—when Bill Watterson had fought steadfastly against any images of Calvin outside the comic strip. And above my hero, a suction-cup Garfield, his blank face full of unfunny punchlines and commercialism, and I wanted to scream out, “You have destroyed this beautiful world and everything good in it, you control-obsessed fuckers!” and slash the guy’s tires, walking off as an untouched maniac. But this person obviously had no shortage of money, as evidenced by their trite knick-knacks, so I decided to do something that would hurt them much more. Even this soccer mom and dad don’t have $40K to shell out for a new one of these.
 
I walked up to it and figured out that it had a computerized ignition system and realized just how much in luck I was. A few months ago, I read this article in 2600 about one particular part of the ignition system for this model. Fact is stranger than fiction. I don’t really like the rest of the script kiddies who read it just to exploit technology for their own good without being productive. I mean, I’m exploiting technology for my own good without being productive—I don’t want any fucking competition here. I broke into the on-board computer through brute force with my laptop, started it, and drove it out of the shitty mall parking lot. I went to the library, printed out a respectable forgery of a title, and then took it to the sketchiest car dealership I could find. They gave me $10,000 ($13,000 if I would have traded it in, which I obviously wasn’t interested in) and credited my bank account accordingly. I was home free, and 10 grand richer thanks to my ingenuity and lack of conscience. Apparently crime does pay. Now, what to do?
 
I took the bus to my friend Rob’s apartment to cash in. My bank, because they’re greedy recipients of the Federal Reserve System, didn’t let me take out the money in my account until the fucking check cleared. But I convinced them to give me $500 right off the bat, so I was already living like a relative king.  This Rob guy is like a shaman. The only problem is that he’s like a shaman who can’t fucking do anything else in society. The guy is stupid beyond belief and not exactly a joy to hang around outside of the drugs. But he has everything imaginable in that place, and if there’s some bizarre research chemical you’re interested in (2-ci in particular), he can get that too, as long as you’ve got the money. Well, I finally did.
 
So I get there and the whole stash is already on the table. Some dealers are smart enough not to sample the merchandise, but not Rob. There’s a reason it was there, even though he didn’t have a customer that day. I look through it, and it’s incredible. Everything from pot to coke to amphetamines to Diazepam to Xanax to Oxycontin to Viagra in that huge box. Rob and I went to high school together, and I’ve seen that thing grow from a box of matches and cigarette pack to a mack crack smack pack. It was gorgeous.
 
Not to give you the idea that I’m an addict whose ontological hermeneutic revolves around drugs, of course. Just looking at the collection of chemicals that would change your perception of this incredible, sprawling world to a completely different one was fascinating and beautiful. How is it possible that our society ignores the possibility that drugs will change our consciousness and naturally lead to human development? It’s totally beyond me. Anyway, my aesthetic actually revolves around rebels from the past, from James Dean to Basho, which is almost the same thing as drug use anyway. Drug users always seem like they’re more experimentative and willing to view the world through a different set of eyes, and that’s what it gives you: new eyes. Artists have always wanted to see things the same way, and I’m convinced that’s why everyone from fucking Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Kurt Cobain has used at some point. They’re all looking for an escape or some way to change the world dramatically, like Allen Ginsberg or Timothy Leary. The cult of the mushroom.
 
I’ve been fascinated with Nico as the center of this whole fixation. She doesn't seem like anything special, but to me, she's a symbol of this whole movement.  She was a model who immigrated to the States in the early ‘60s and went on to befriend Andy Warhol and become part of The Velvet Underground. In these pictures, she’s a glamorous chanteuse, but on her albums, the very first thing you notice is this deep warbling German voice. She’s been a fascinating person to me since I found out about her. Anyway, even though I’m a man living in 2006, I feel this inextinguishable need to emulate her, because I don’t actually think I’ll ever listen to anything as pure or cool for the rest of my life, let alone create. It doesn’t matter how many hipper-than-thou-art circles I run around in: the result will be the same. She, like most of the other artists at Warhol’s Factory, used drugs so heavily that they weren’t even expected to be sober anymore. The drugs morphed into their personalities, or their personalities morphed into the drugs.  You can use the name Nico to give someone Counter-Culture 101 in one word.
 
Black Betty, Mary Jane, and Benny became best friends with those artists who tried to find new ways to experience the world and expand consciousness. Black Betties were amphetamines usually taken by housewives, Mary Jane is obvious as hell, and Benny meant Benzedrine, another form of amphetamine extremely popular through the counter-culture in the ‘60s. Nico and a bunch of other people, including Burroughs, Kesey, the Who and basically everyone else who was hip to drugs back then were taking them, from Burroughs to Kesey.
 
So I decided to get the first four items scratched off my checklist. It feels good to be productive. I gave Rob $250 and he gave me a bulk discount on a quarter ounce of chronic (i.e. pot that makes your toes curl when you smoke it), 10 tabs of acid (which will make you see God, even if you’re a confirmed atheist), and 20 benzedrine pills (hell yeah). He asked how I suddenly came into so much money, and I responded that a rich Republican benefactor had suddenly become uncharacteristically generous. In his state, Rob couldn’t really remember what benefactor meant, but he was content with a few $20s in his wallet.
 
Rob’s acidhead friend was there too. The guy had always intrigued and annoyed me simultaneously. He’s one of the acid mystics who instead of believing that he’s actually a glass of orange juice believed something even more improbable: he had been contacted by God when he took mushrooms one time. I mean, come on. You’re taking this drug to try to hallucinate and see things that aren’t really there, and then from there on out you believe that you’ve been contacted by God? Talk about things that aren’t there.
 
The worst part is this guy’s not even the typical evangelical Christian, doing the whole, “Oh I love God now let’s watch some TV and hang out and eat chips and salsa” routine. No, he’s batshit insane. This guy must have taken some seriously potent shit, because he takes religion pretty fucking seriously. The guy changed his name from Albert to Melchizedek, if that gives you any perspective. But it gets better.
 
I heard the whole story from him a few months ago while I was freeloading (read: freebasing) off of Rob. Apparently Albert (as I prefer calling him, partly because he’s convinced that it’s his devil name) was hanging around in the forest by his suburban house. He took a bunch of mushrooms and did the whole God trip deal. Never trust anything that grows in cow shit. He was with his friends and got the divine call when he saw two tree branches bend in the shape of a cross.
 
Jesus Mary and Joseph, it’s a right angle! A phenomenon which people experience literally thousands of times throughout the course of a day. But somehow Rob got it in his head that this was the cross of Jesus and he was supposed to follow it into the woods. So he takes off his shoes (obviously the guy had read Exodus a few many times already and the mushrooms were just letting his pent-up psychosis express itself) and goes walking in the woods. So his friends come back and see a pair of Nikes and are like what the fuck? They follow the footprints into the woods, but the guy has had a manic trip and goes off following all of the crosses he can find, convinced that once he gets to the final cross, then Armageddon will happen or he’ll be met by an army of benevolent aliens or some shit, who knows. He’s sanctimonious about the fact that when his friends followed him into the woods, they couldn’t find him because they couldn’t follow in his footsteps.  Like that “Footprints in the Sand” bullshit.  I think this has less to do with Albert being a bona fide prophet of God and probably more to do with the fact that he had a good head start on him and was running like his actions were going to immanentize the Eschaton.
 
Right now, the guy is sitting next to me watching Trading Spaces and drooling as I write this. If that’s God’s prophet, count me even further out. The guy runs off into the desert with a pocket Bible in his coat and lives out there for like five weeks, which I would never believe, but Rob confirms this when he’s not looking dead. So at first he gets hungry and eats berries and looks for more mushrooms, since he believes that instead of unleavened bread, Jesus was actually passing out mushrooms for communion. I also heard rumors about locusts and honey, but I don’t even want to get into that.  This is like Timothy Leary out-there, except he’s not brilliant and doesn’t have the interesting perspective on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
 
After even thinking about this story, I decided to chill out and just be content with being human instead of some divine prophet Ezekiel on a bad trip. I took a few bennies (my namesake), smoked four bowls of pot, and went off on a philosophical journey with this weird trip-hop playing on the stereo. One of the albums they purposefully made for people in altered states. I closed my eyes and watched pictures flow through my mind of this beautiful natural scene, mountaintops twisting around, huge patches of green trees that had strangely decided to remain hidden in my brain before making themselves manifest now. At this point, the music was ethereal and abstract, accompanying the images perfectly. Then, just as a thundering bassline and loop started to a song I had never heard before, my mind’s eye zoomed in on two of the mountains and back out to a man standing at the summit with an enormous canyon separating them from the next. A rope, precariously tied to rocks on each side, was the only thing that connected them. I was astonished by the clarity of this vision and what it signified to me.

Nietzsche described this in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where used an analogy of this mountaintop scene and a canyon. The analogy demonstrated the gap between ordinary men and the Übermensch, a person beyond society’s conventions who rises to an entirely new echelon of being. There’s a thin rope stretched along the mountaintops that only those struggling to cross to the other side can walk across. In the middle of the mountains, there is an abyss, nothingness. Nietzsche wrote, “If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” It’s the terrifying peril of crossing the rope, falling into oblivion.
 
I always thought of the first mountain as a dull, barren wasteland with mirages that keep people there, searching vainly for water in the sand. The other mountain in my dreams was the glorious land of the Nephilim, green and lush, soaring Babelian towers flowing with milk and honey. Some people say that Nietzsche fell in when trying to get to that promised land.
 
He was admitted to an insane asylum in Germany in 1889 after suffering from symptoms of delusions of grandeur. Well, since he’s one of the most famous philosophers in western history, he wasn’t really having delusions. He was actually grand. Modern historians speculate that he was afflicted with syphilis during these years, which caused him to go mad. During this period, Nietzsche wrote a series of letters to friends that critics, even the friendliest Walter Kauffman-esque fanboy, refer to as “The Letters of Insanity.” He wrote letters in a fantastical but cogent manner to everyone from August Strindberg to Cosima Wagner to King Umberto I of Italy and received replies from some. He fantasized about killing the Kaiser and Bismarck and jailing the Pope, probably viewing them as tyrannical and preventive of the Übermensch’s rise to glory. (And who knows, maybe Germany would have been better off with him as the Kaiser, especially since he despised anti-Semitism.) This makes more sense when you know that he signed the letter as “Der Gekreuzigte,” or “The Crucified.” He was basically writing short fictional letters as well as normal letters.
 
Nietzsche’s critics always point out this supposed insanity at the end of his life, but when you really examine it, he was more sane than almost anyone could expect of a genius whose ideas had been ridiculed despite their brilliance. I’d probably say some weird shit too. After he wrote definitively in philology, explicated and undermined Apollonian thought by celebrating the Dionysian, and created a new perspective of the world, they not only didn’t listen, but called him crazy? That would piss me off enough to go apeshit on someone.
 
He signed some of the letters as “The Crucified,” and others as “Dionysos,” the Greek god of fertility and wine. This obviously shows a hint of a dichotomy in his thought. Nietzsche was just slightly embittered towards Christianity, but his struggle seemed to be against canonical scripture and blind sheep of Christendom (no pun intended) rather than with Jesus himself. With Christianity being an almost universal belief at the time, it’s hardly surprising that his superego would try to control his id by appealing to this societal standard. So these polar opposites are being expressed in his personality, and he has an incredibly difficult time trying to synthesize and make sense of them. Some people would call it schizophrenia, but it’s what goes on in our daily lives. If you’re walking by a Cinnabon, and you’re trying to watch your weight, you’re getting pulled in opposite directions. One voice in your head says, “Be sensible. Think about how many calories that thing has in it. The food pyramid doesn’t have a cinnamon roll level, and if it did, it wouldn’t be the base. The other voice says, “Fuck it.  These things are awesome.” This is typical and natural, a constant cost-benefit analysis in our heads which creates our ego. And sometimes, that cognitive dissonance, the Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic, can create some pretty cool results.

So, Nietzsche was dealing with the Cinnabon problem on a metaphysical level. At least I think so. And he may have expressed this in a bizarre way, but he did that when people perceived him as sane just as he did when their perception of him changed. I just think there should be some point where a person showcases enough intelligence to not be classified as insane, unless they’re harming others in some way. If anyone reached that level of intelligence, it was him. So, for any academics who happened upon this story in one of the zines I’ll submit this to, I hereby motion that we change the name of these letters to the “Crucified Dionysus Letters.” With this motion, I end my tirade. On to the next one.

Back to the bennies, trip-hop and the way my drug-induced fancy fits in with the pseudo-philosophy. As I’m sitting there, all of these thoughts about Nietzsche become part of the picture. Like I said, the music is blaring. The breakbeats, pads, and guitars are soaring, and I have this video camera in my mind imagining the mountain range. The features on the man’s face become clearer. He has a gaunt frame, his short hair is sharp-flat-piano-key black, and his jaw is clenched. At the tremendous build of the song, the drum machine playing 32nd beats, strings swirling in the air, the singer raising her voice in a celebration and mourning of life, he ascends. The music cuts off for four beats. During the silence, he rises into the air. There are no flapping of wings, no jet engines, and no effort made this time by the man except meditation. He ascends over the Abyss and touches his two feet to the next mountaintop, ignoring the rope, and he never looks down.