Are We Recording? Hit Record.:

I can see excellent reasons for allowing drug experiences to unfold as ephemera. I get it. I really do. But when it comes down to it we need more data, damn it, and I feel like I have a duty to the community to gather as much information as I possibly can. Or maybe that’s just how I justify my practice. In any event it’s hilarious to listen to myself trying to read Finnegans Wake when the words keep rearranging themselves on the page, and this one guy’s crazy breakthrough experience is hands-down the most moving monologue I’ve ever heard in my life.

I’m particularly interested in primary records, by which I mean records that are made during the experience itself. Hunter S. Thompson strapped a big clunky ’70s tape player to his belly when he wandered into the neon night in search of the American Dream. Both the raw tapes themselves and the gonzo articles that proceeded from them are records of his misadventures, but the tapes are primary and the finished pieces are secondary. Your notebook doodles, EKG readouts, tapes of your drum jams, and the poems written in mustard on your walls are primary. Finished trip reports, recipes, and the musical comedy inspired by your experience are secondary. Neither is inherently more valuable than the other, but primary records are hard to come by and rarely discussed.

It’s good to keep in mind the possible legal and social issues raised by evidence of crimes having been committed. The ways in which your past can come back to bite you in the ass are not always predictable. Consider the case of the Canadian psychologist Andrew Feldmar. In 2007, when attempting to enter the United States, a border guard Googled his name and discovered an article he had written wherein he admitted to having taken LSD twice in 1967. Andy’s scofflaw admission resulted in him being barred from entering the country. And that was over a mere secondary record with no hard evidence to back it up. Imagine how bong-toting Olympian Michael Phelps must feel about primary records these days! Remember, almost every cell phone is a camera now, and they’re all plugged in to the shared data field. Your friends might not intend to sell you out (at the moment) but stuff gets away from people. It gets lost, or stolen, or accidentally left on abandoned hardware, or posted somewhere “safe” that isn’t. I always joke that if I ever run for office I’m running on the Party Platform anyway, but in deadly earnest I may one day want to emigrate or get a job or something and it could really suck if some of my favorite records slipped out of my control. And information is very slippery stuff.

I tried to record a very bizarre and intense DXM experience (shared by 6 people) and I’ll tell you what: that tape didn’t make a lick of sense. A better recording medium would probably help and I’m not entirely down with the idea of video-taping something like that for many reasons, the biggest being the Hawthorne Effect. (Which basically means you act differently because you know someone is observing/recording your behavior).

Related posts:

1. even the clouds can attest to this experience
2. Science and Human Spirit
3. Human progress
4. Human Nature and the BFF
5. Also, the death of the flawed, natural human spirit.