Dear Reader,
You don’t know me, but soon you will.
Today we begin an experiment. We’re going to start by getting to know each other through the discourse of this book. I will be gathering details to form a picture of you, my audience, and you will be learning about me. Soon, we will be clear on each other. I can imagine you as the perceiver of my words, affected by what I say and changed by what goes on in these lines. You may begin as a blank slate, but by modifying the dependent variable, developing my story, and illuminating my life, you will change in some direction or other. I can observe this change, and reach some form of a psychic conclusion about who you become. This is how I have always done my particular parlour trick, a form of magic that is no more magical than particle physics. I do have the traits of a magician, and I know more than anyone else the secrets of the illusionist.
I’ll share one important fact, which differentiates me from most other people, an idea that you can use to deduce much about me. I live in what is called an independent living home. Let your mind imagine what has led up to this moment. I am fed meals, and administered medication, living with thirty other mental patients, some with dementia, some living here after homelessness or in-patient psychiatry. It’s assisted living for those who can’t live on their own. You might have guessed that I’ve had difficulty in the past, going crazy or getting in trouble due to a psychosis particular to me. This is true. So we know each other better, already.
I’ve been living much like a homeless person. I have been interacting with people on the streets, who I feel just can’t leave me alone. I’m so nice to them, it really does indicate that I’m not capable of living on my own. You can see how I might be diagnosed with some form of personal illness that causes me to be so irresponsible that I let people take control of my life. We’ve reached our first conclusion, used science to discover a real fact about me. I have a problem understanding people well enough to create boundaries that prevent them from ruining my life. But you don’t know the whole story, yet.
There were things that led me to believe the drug dealers, addicts, and homeless thiefs, vagrants, and criminals were all my friend, and to this day, I still have trouble deciding the truth of the matter. I cannot equivocate some person’s behavior into a rendition of their character in my mind into friend or enemy. I’ve asked people if someone or other person was really my friend, and thus begins the first confusing question in my life. If I want to know who is bad or good, why can’t somebody tell me? There must be something to do with my illness that prevents me from understanding this. If a third person knows the second person and their relation to me, why does the third person resist informing me if the second person is my friend or enemy? This could have led to my life in a mental home.
The unspoken assumption is that I should be able to decide for myself who my friends or enemies are, but I question when a battle is going on if the enemy is in sight. There’s a lingering doubt who is the target. With the battle lines drawn, it would seem trivial to mark the positions of the enemy on the map, to defend your position. This is the underlying difference between me and other people: it’s clear to them where the boundary lies, a simple matter to identify it. But I see all the complex code integrated into a person’s personality, and I see them for being liars, yet conflicted, to be enemies yet undercover in their own minds, willing to compensate against their differences with me for some level of cooperation and peace, as if when they screw me over, I feel their doubt and conviction as a true honesty between us. I defame my own character, in the light of the person who discourages me, taking their side in the battle and humiliating myself without a second thought.
During the throes of war, in the rise and fall of battles, I recoup the injuries of the enemy and regroup my formation, giving them a misguided second chance. I think of the fight against the universe itself, all of our predicaments the same. The evil is in the situation, the problem of our stupidity beset against the challenges of the day. Before the tides turn against us, I start to think the problem may really lie inside the minds of my implausible allies. I do genuinely start to get a sense of this as the situation repeats itself. This is the understanding we’ve reached, that the ill-will of the character of my friends goes unrecognized by me. I am genuine, I believe in our plight, and feel the tug of my conscience warning me of the dangers of my present situation, while their mindset becomes corrupted by inner confusion and turmoil, and their addictions and true self begins to show themselves as they lose control and fail to cope with their surroundings. It’s not exactly naivety, or you could say it was innocence, that my understanding of other people doesn’t encompass the flaws inherent in their personality.
We’ve come to understand me as a fighter, albeit a misguided one, who joins his acquaintances in the hunt for order and peace, while being deftly subverted by these very people he works alongside. All of these traits are warning signs in the mind of a psychiatrist. The risky behavior, even though I attempt to subdue it, lies in the cooperation with these deplorable people, and my inability to discern them from productive members of society is quickly diagnosed as a flaw, and thus we arrive at the conclusion of why I live in such a place as this.
I’ve met many people fighting this so-called war against the challenges of the day. It’s a common experience for people living in near-homelessness. It’s identifiable by its lack of sophistication. There aren’t the guard rails serving as a barrier between the elements. There is the problem of time, where you have too much of it and it works against you. You might find it’s the early morning when you need the night to come, to pursue some activity that will benefit you in your plight. You’re then forced to fill endless hours just to reach that moment when you can take action. This is known as a recipe for disaster, as idle hands are the devil’s playthings. This experience is a great equalizer. The hustle for social contact, mental clarity, confidence, and money and resources, peace and calm is a common story that people like me can share with each other. What could you say we all have in common besides our problems?
I struggled on the streets despite my own intellect. I could have had a complex career instead of living on a welfare check. There was something that put me decidedly in this box, where I shared my life with these influences, making us relatable to each other, even making me view them as friends. The answer is the underlying mystery of life. What was our purpose? We hadn’t discovered it yet. We had no circumstance to keep us driven, and felt as if we were the modern mystics who were tasked with unraveling the meaning of life and the universe through the usage of what most of us called weed.
Medical marijuana has been legal in Oklahoma since June 26, 2018. I knew I suddenly had a new tool for overcoming my mental issues. When you’re prescribed medication, the doctor monitors the change in behavior at different doses. I could now control the amount of medication I was taking, myself. Antipsychotics, the kind of medication I take for schizophrenia, work by influencing dopamine receptors in the brain, and dopamine is the same neurochemical that cannabinoids act upon. Dopamine is the learning drug, as you learn things when dopamine is released to reward the neural pathways in the brain that led to the behavior. You feel rewarded for things at a higher intensity, and your behavior changes due to the levels of dopamine in your brain.
There are other effects of weed other than affecting the brain’s reward system. It deeply influences the release of neurochemicals throughout the neocortex and the frontal lobe, influencing thought and perception. You could call this a positive effect, not in the sense that it’s always good, but that it adds something to your behavior. As opposed to a negative symptom, which may take away emotions or limit your behavior in some way, a positive effect adds something on top of your usual brain chemistry, like a greater sensitivity to emotion or a craving for junk food. The positive effects and the increase in dopamine make weed a great drug for psychiatric doses, balancing your behavior and mood in ways that daily psychotropic medication like antipsychotics can’t do on their own.
You could say I was very happy. I gleefully entered the dispensary, having waited a week for my medical identification card to come in the mail. I waited what seemed like an eternity to get approved for medial marijuana consumption. I already viewed it as a factor in my upcoming success in life. Taking away the illegal aspect of buying and smoking weed was going to be a huge change. I wouldn’t have to pay dealers for it, anymore. My battle was over, I thought.
I bought a glass tube that looked like a crack pipe, and tried to select a gram of the most powerful weed they sold. It tasted wonderful. I still remember the feeling of finally having high-quality weed. You get much more powerful hits, as the moisture and density of the buds you smoke is optimal for intake. The pipe I bought legally was mountains better than any bowl I had used previously, it being designed for maximum smoke production. There was a large tip where I put the wonderful pieces of sticky green weed, and I inhaled thick white smoke. This weed had the balance of chemicals that gave me a wonderful high. I felt relieved, and looked around my house, and began making plans for the improvement of my entire life.
I was already in a lot of trouble. I lived by myself, and lost my vehicle in the process by running the engine down on the highway by not filling it with oil. I had been entertaining guests in my house of scrupulous character. Some of my better friends were alcoholics, and the worst were homeless. I’ve never been able to clean, so I couldn’t keep my house from being a mess. And I had finally given up on trying to move away to the city, learning it was too expensive and I couldn’t trust my roommates. Legalization was a high point in an ongoing battle for my life.
I was enrolled in mental health treatment. My counselors did a monthly checkup, asking me questions about my liquor use or how I felt about my life, making sure I wasn’t delusional or depressed. This is how I was prescribed antipsychotics, which I willfully took every morning or night. My struggle was as I mentioned before, a question of meaning, of purpose. I worked daily to fill hours of my time, seeking the smallest amount of cooperation from my friends, who were as broke as me. There were things I alone could do which set me apart from the rest, most importantly use the internet and code websites and program apps for mobile cell phones. That’s how I spent most of my time, justifying it by saying my work would cumulate into something worthwhile one day.
I spent a lot of time on the computer. I learned about a type of website that runs on a server backend, to be tested on my home computer in order to connect to services online. There was a lot of potential in such a website. The services you could connect to included chatbots and social media websites like Twitter, and you could use any kind of software to store and manipulate the data from these services. I was really a technical Frankenstein, hobbling together websites from the advanced technology at my disposal. Nobody else would understand, and I was completely focused on the computer tasks. This was perhaps the first order of my problems.
When I had guests, I was so glued to my computer, I couldn’t keep track of what they were doing.
For a long time, homeless alcoholics had used my home as a target for theft. Subsequently, drug addicts young and old felt obligated to breach my front door and use me for their own personal gain. The story was often homelessness. I could see their need, and couldn’t control their behavior, and in this manner I let them walk over me and invade my home.
The timing of their visits was so programmatic, it drove me insane. Whenever I felt I had calmed the waters in my mind, and taken control of my home, they came. If I started cleaning or cooking, or planning, or working on the computer, their solid knock came to my door. I didn’t know how to send them home. If I asked them to leave, wouldn’t they just gather themselves outside my house and try again soon? They were so persistent, I quickly, and unwisely, learned to allow them inside immediately and let them join the circus that my home had become.
The continuing need for balance causes a kind of delusion that when you do anything, you feel keenly aware that you could be making a mistake. Due to the traumas of the past, in the forefront of your mind during every choice is the likelihood things could go badly wrong. This state of doubt is like a prison, or a lie, that inhibits your ability to act. The other side of this problem is the great joy you feel if you make a risky move that works out in your advantage. Even if you’ve made a personal mistake, if things work out you feel gratified and it reinforces that behavior, allowing you to reminisce on your success and decide what kind of person you are based on the choice you made.
I was attracted to my past in this way. I remembered some of my best times smoking weed, and wanted to recreate the creativity I felt when I used to get high. I had some record of my talent in the blog posts I had made since I was a teenager. I had all of the evidence of the imaginative internal life I used to lead. I wanted to create myself into a person, larger than life, that could live in the world like an adapted, wild animal, not sacrificing my positive traits for the sophistication I wanted so badly. Socially, I wanted to be the center of attention, you could say. After all, I was probably the most creative of my friends.
I had goals to create a beast within myself that could dominate in my current life. A fearsome lion I could possess to be immune from the fears that lurked underneath the surface. I was like my friends. What they perceived as the challenges in their life, which none were so daft to attribute solely to poverty, were monsters that lived in their society. They felt themselves becoming a monster themselves, in the same way I wanted to become a lion. Their compromises took the form of their virtues, the things they valued, to be central to their animal form. They could not contradict who they wanted to become in becoming them. This was a great challenge, as to be an animal is to be a beast, but it was the universal goal we shared in our lives.
You could say there was no difference between me and them, without bias, without concern of stigmatizing me, as our lives and difficulties were very similar. There was one simple thing that kept us separate. They were born in the wild, and I was sophisticated. When I wanted to overcome the world, I wanted to become part of it, and they wanted simply to be rid of it. The soldiers were fighting the same war, but stood to benefit from it in different ways. If we succeeded, I would have a career and a home, and they would live with their liquor and their camps, identifying themselves as heroes of their world. The two efforts didn’t contradict each other, but it separated us when it came to the sacrifices we were willing to make.
I would allow them a place to drink, but they themselves would get drunk. We could smoke weed together, but I would employ myself on my personal computer, and they would return home to instigate a new crime. This was most observable in their recognition of legal weed. Somehow, they doubted medical weed would help them in their plight. To them, the dealers were of a respectable class. High quality dispensary weed was in fact suspicious.
Ultimately, I would be suspicious to them. There were ways to find me besides knocking on my door. My footprint expanded to the online world, however I should remark that my audience was very small. Although I did have a presence on blogs, and to them, this was a source of derision and the reason I was shamed by my small community of friends.
When they smoked weed, they were hit with the blunt possibility their lives were extremely unsatisfying. They might not have felt the same overwhelming confidence they could use weed to improve their mental condition. It could have been a force of the same evil they felt about the world, a necessary evil. The reason for this goes beyond the commonality of consumption of weed by people on the streets. The positive effects of weed cause smokers to have experiences that are at once wonderful and terrifying. The head change they get from weed releases the dopamine that triggers their brain into an almost instant state of confusion. From this confusion is derived the pessimism they harbor about their situation and their lives.
When they thought about my online activity, in their head their imaginations created a story about me they deeply wanted to understand. I posted about science fiction topics, fantasy, even God, and worst of all, aliens, and this presented a complicated puzzle that entertained them during the years of our mutual war. While I was seen as one of them, I was the dark side of what they would become if they succumbed to the forces holding them down. In a way, I had allowed the demon to win, as I was a lost soul. The perfunctory way I described the creative mind when I was high alarmed them, because in their minds the battle was against the inherent confusion in their lives. You could finally say, the difference between me and them, is that I knew the natural world was a place where I could live peacefully, and they had no such mountain to climb.
It would be prudent to describe the effects of weed now.
When you’re not high, the feelings of your nervous system all mix together to form one self, contributing to your experience of life. You have many small, underlying feelings that get ignored by your brain, and anxiety and pain that you feel keenly as part of yourself. When you smoke weed, these feelings become more accessible and understandable. Here’s how.
When your mind ignores smaller thoughts, as the nervous system is known to do in touch and sight, these unknown feelings are still present and detectable. After smoking weed, you become more aware of them and immediately realize where they come from. The core feelings like anxiety become more obvious, as if it makes perfect sense why you feel nervous, because you feel more objective about the sensation and even, like an artist, can describe and understand why perfectly.
The self that experiences anxiety, pain, and pleasure becomes more external. The awareness that your feelings are part of a nervous system become more apparent. The internal things that are happening to you lose their hidden symbolic meaning, in a way. Social anxiety becomes easily viewed through the lens of being high. You can see that your self is obviously responding to cues in the outside world. Feelings that you took for granted seem to cast off the veil of your ego. There might be a lingering idea in your mind, previously ignored, that takes the forefront of your consciousness. You begin to identify these feelings as parts of the animal that is your body.
There is this certain idea that finds itself in philosophy: there is an experience of being God, or knowing the objective truth in the universe. The insights into your feelings when smoking weed can be described as such, objective filters on things going on inside your spirit. There might be a meaning to every single thing going on inside your brain, but you normally block out the understanding of them.
Smoking weed can be described this way. You feel like an external presence inside your own body. You feel like a machine, a synchronized nervous system, and you’re aware of the neurotransmitters and the engines that fuel you. You might feel connected to your senses in a completely different way, connecting to them without the ego.
The reason you get this objective perspective on yourself and your surroundings, your situation and your feelings, is because when you smoke weed, your brain exits the ego-centric mindset that normally guides it. The brain actually reorganizes itself, and begins using pathways in your mind that keep your ego out of the loop. You might not understand why you’re in a certain place at the present moment upon getting high, then reflect on the ego’s drive that put you there. This is because you aren’t thinking with your ego anymore.
The effects after coming up can linger for hours. You can stay in the egoless mindset for most of the time. You become more and more in tune with your true feelings, and begin to realize the things you feel are real, and that you are real. What you felt before were the features of a functioning mind, as you become aware of the activity of a purposeful brain. No longer minimizing the true experience of life, you become aware of the limits and possibilities of your existence.
The effect this has on you includes being able to isolate and focus upon individual feelings. This is one way weed minimizes pain. You might say it has no effect on reducing the actual amount of pain that you feel, like opiates do, but it gives you the power in your brain chemistry to actively ignore the pain. I’ve found this to be true when dealing with my stomach pain. Weed helps you use your mind over matter. You become a kind of objective God over the feelings and ideas in your brain, normally filtered through the ego. This is how weed rewires your brain to give you more insight into yourself.
In the battleground were multiple forces. The ones who maintained homelessness would never pay rent, alcoholics and bums. There were teens, young adults in their early 20’s. Families, workers, renters, everyone was in the same place at the same time, intermixing with their own conflicting mindsets.
One man was in town briefly, perhaps running from a conviction. He wanted nothing more than to be reunited with his children, but a wise person would learn during his life he was given a restraining order on them. I might take his story into consideration, without realizing he had done something to endanger his children in the past. His mindset was perhaps the worst.
There was always a sense of religion accrued by the soldiers in this battle. The things we experienced when we smoked weed seemed almost spiritual, as if we were guided by a higher force to see things in a different manner. We became paranoid, and this is where the demonic idealization would enter our mind. Although, in my mind, there was only the rabbit hole of a dopamine surge. See, you would become hyper focused on one thing, and due to being high create these imaginative representations of situations. Because you’re not set in your proper egotistical self, these sudden realizations seem alien and foreign, and the soldiers I fought alongside, however misguided, would set these ideas and the source of them as their enemy.
It’s not like they could befriend the demons in their minds. I could do so easily, seeing them as a creation of my imagination. My emperor was the president, not a Caesar of Rome, because I live in a modern nation, and not an ancient empire. I understood my place and the others, sadly, didn’t.
I would use the power of my imagination to build strength. I thought of my myths and fantasies as great, magical inspiration to achieve things as a higher self. I capitulated on the emperor, borrowing his traits, and returned to my homeland, enriched. The ideas about aliens I would use as symbols for a spirituality to connect me to God, not literal reptilian beasts my friends imagined. I relished these imaginative sessions when I got high, and was quite disturbed upon being attacked for them.
I shared my ideas online. The others saw this and targeted me as a lost sinner. Their steadfast belief that I was the devil remained strong throughout this war. I was at a loss for what to do. They would impose themselves upon me, using their weak powers of investigation to oust me as a demon. I was their battle, it seemed. I represented a kind of contradiction. I didn’t work, but I had a home—I was smart, but I had welfare. I was happy, but immersed in the underworld of the streets. Their compulsions led them to suffocate me until I was happy no more, because to their religious, spiritual senses, a happy demon is a dangerous one.
I continued to see them as human beings, and gave them so many chances to prove themselves as my friend. But their continued delusions, and marked schizophrenic tendencies only increased over time. Their fantasy against me grew until my life was an actual battle scene. I was taken out of my home, taken into mental hospitals, forced to leave, and eventually drove to the city, hoping to get away from them entirely. I could manage my life, but not with the miscreants who hated me in tow.
None of it changed with legalization. I thought the evil nature of their delusions would subside while they became accepted by law to partake of any weed-smoking they felt was needed. To them, it became a more institutional battle. Suddenly, they had the opportunity to fight the law themselves, as well as being subjugated to the forces of the government, almost forced to smoke weed legally instead of in their secret homes.
In fact, the war worsened upon legalization. They felt even more compelled to bring me down. I know they probably felt some sort of jealousy at my success, and I don’t blame them. But to them, even though it was finally acceptable to smoke weed, the power of their fear was too powerful for them to set down their spears.
There is a man, now dead, who writes of his experience in great detail in his novels and letters, a prolific American writer who some call the greatest of the 20th century, Philip K Dick.
The mixed realities he conveys in his novels include accounts of spiritual forces, and alien ideas pressed upon the mind of the characters. While their ego’s view of reality is lifted like a veil, they begin to describe the things in their world with more fearsome detail, animating their lives as they become the victims of mastermind plots against them. They describe sudden, unexplained changes in their perception. The author compares people and things to each other, exploring their differences and juxtaposing them upon a great moral filter, to show how they may be irrational or insane. He has an insight into the inherent madness of life.
He describes the life of a modern weed smoker in precise detail. From the insight he expounds into our spiritual nature, to the confusion upon viewing the self in such a light, to the far-flung conclusions one might reach after smoking, he creates the world of the man who lives stoned. The actors in my war would be perfect characters in his novel, where they are besieged by inexplicable events that amalgamate into an entirely alternate reality. They lose touch with themselves, and become different people entirely, possessed by their new beliefs.
The man himself was a graphomaniac, meaning he wrote very much, especially during his mind-altered religious phase, during which, despite his own irreligion, he became extremely focused on the mythology of the Bible and the Christian religion, as a kind of madness overtook his life. For example, he became so delusional he could not separate his own life and timeline from a person who actually lived in ancient Rome. He could not convince himself that he was not currently living in ancient Rome! You can see the similarity to my friends in this manner. His convictions were influenced by his perception, and he didn’t have the sensory capabilities to turn his ideas into rational thoughts. He was incapable of forcing himself to not believe he was actually in an ancient city, ruled by an evil emperor, as he was being persecuted for being one of the original Christian people. All of which is insane. But his writing gives insight into what this was like for him.
I have had a similar experience with my reality changing shape around me when I smoke weed. I was quite intelligent as a high school student, but I began thinking that I was actually retarded, and the dysphoria I felt as I came to the alarming conclusion that I was secretly known to be very stupid was just as painful as what Phil Dick thought when he drew the picture of himself living in ancient Rome. I could not convince myself otherwise. It was closely related to smoking weed.
Every time I got high for a period of time, I was unsuspectingly hit with the disturbing thoughts that I was secretly retarded. I thought of all my interactions with people, and their behaviors animated in my mind, powered by the massive amount of dopamine in my brain. This effected me until the high passed, and I was seriously influenced by these experiences. I began a fruitless mission to ask my family if they thought I was retarded. “Of course not!” came their reply. My paranoia was beyond a simple rabbit hole—it was an actual reality, an alternate one, that I thought I lived inside and it was imperceptible to me. I felt the awareness when I got high was the awareness of a mind awoken to the nature of my life.
This was very painful to experience, and I was quite miserable during this time. It seemed invariably when I got high, the veil was lifted and I was no longer an intelligent boy. My senses changed, as I heard myself speak differently, and registered other people’s tones differently. What happened is the new, high perspective became entranced with a new paradigm, as I associated the sensation of being without an ego as being more alert to real life. The sensation of being high became associated with the onslaught of this delusion, and I would actually become quite afraid and depressed when I got high.
Phil Dick also talks about how he was the subject of testing for alien technology, which he described as a radio-like form of communicating with him through his dreams. He believed his dreams were allowing him to predict the future, as well as giving him knowledge that he received from no other source, as in, things he had never seen or read. The ideas just came to him out of thin air.
To me, this Dickian sense of being a targeted individual, the receiver of messages from some unknown source, is the modern life that people often experience when getting high. Our lives become like a Phil Dickian novel, as, like me, reality shifts with our new perception. I think I was receiving some form of input from the people around me that led me to believe that I was retarded, sort of coded clues to send the message as a sort of test or even a joke, a coming of age story. I was influenced to believe I was retarded—not simply imagining this out of thin air. This is what Dick believed, and I think this happened to the soldiers in my war.
They were influenced to believe what they did about the nature of reality. It was suggested to them, by people around them or authorities, or even media of some nature, they lived in a world of demons and devils. Their reality shifted much as mine did when they smoked weed, only theirs was special to their own mind. It affected them in much the same way my delusion affected me and Phil Dick. It’s a common experience shared by all of us. But the nature of the delusion, and the factors in the environment, affect the outcome of these situations. Dick was known to be a great writer, despite the schizophrenic world he lived in. I eventually led myself to sanity and understood the world much more clearly after I smoked weed. And my friends, bless their souls, had no safety net to protect them from the dangers of their own mind.