An endless stream of thoughts always comes to my mind when I am driving down the freeway. The thought begins somewhere usually through the aid of a visual or aural stimulus such as something along the road or hearing something in song, for example. As I approached 85 from De Anza Blvd, I listened to a downtempo chillout station on Pandora Radio. Glancing down, I noticed the album cover shown on the screen of my phone. The image I saw was so brief, before I returned my eyes to their rightful place, all I caught from the glimpse was a Fir-looking tree on a creme colored background. From there, as I mounted the freeway on-ramp, my mind wandered to an image of an all green planet with one enlarged tree disproportionate to the rest of the planet's size. The silly distortion recalled some distant images in my memory, although unable to put my finger on where they came from, my mind jumped quickly to images of a big, sprawling jungle of a park in San Francisco near the Haight and Asbury and then to scenery I experienced there on LSD and mushrooms. I began to stew up a glorious, glam concoction of nostalgia that set me abruptly into a fright. Beginning down the freeway on ramp, I immediately slid this feeling to the side and started visualizing the realities of my experiences with hallucinogens: the few last LSD experiences that left me a mess, to say the least; the helplessness of hopelessness I felt after as if maybe really, truly, this time I had fried my gourd for good; the inability to speak, formulate or vocalize any words to respond to anything that was said to me as I came down scrambled and fluffed sitting around with a group of acquaintances at the campsite; the sensitivity of my body, the physical discomfort, the confusion, feeling so lost.
Remembering driving home from a party toting a few beginners with their bottle of cheap vodka clinking around in the open trunk feeling like a dried out stick still mildly hallucinating the irises of my eyes non-existant. Putting the element of anxiety on the table from the last situation described I found other situations to remind myself of: the sixty dollars I sent with someone to get dope and the wait finding security in knowing that soon I wouldn't feel dope-sick only to wait hours and them to never return, the pain of when a friend trying to assist the injection missed my vein and shot black tar heroin into my muscle, the pain of shooting black tar heroin into my feet and missing the vein, all the frustration and blood dripping all over the place. As I got on the freeway, I kept my mind on the task of focusing on all the bad times while I was using and drinking.
I really didn't treat the girls I dated fairly during this period of my life when I was on drugs. I used my girlfriends then, and took them for granted. One in particular, sweet, cute and funny as could be I latched on to her in hopes to ease the pain from the previous relationship. For a time, we had fun together. After a few months, I broke up with her. Why did I do that? I felt like if I dragged things out, it would be substantially worse emotionally for her. I told you the excuse that you deserved better than a heroin addict such as myself who was lowering his standards by the minute. Thinking about her, I remember the day I visited her at her parent's house, gave me the leftover chinese and prosciutto from her fridge, helping her reach things in the kitchen.. her gently soft but firm kisses from her smooth lips. Anyways, as I came close to my exit, I really felt like writing about this memory while it was still fresh on my mind.
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