An Investigation Into the Phenomenology of LSD + Shark Fishing
By Casey Jone
What piece of work is a man!
How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty!
In form and moving how express and admirable!
In action how like an Angel! in apprehension how like a god!
The beauty of the world.. The paragon of animals..
And yet to me, what is this?
Quintessence of dust.
-William Shakespeare
Babbling In B. Minor- Chattanooga
You can learn a lot of things from the flowers, especially in the month of June...
-Lewis Carroll
I took the first hit in my last class of the week. A Buddhist and Indian philosophy course taught by a jolly middle-aged white man who had a penchant for cats and modern film. I listened to him wax about cows and emptiness while my puttering gaze contemplated the buxom redhead leaned against the tall classroom window. Trees outside bent -were they bending?- about her brooding silhouette. While contemplating Anatta and all existential ilk that goes with it, the subcranial throb of what might have been an acid trip announced itself to the court of my conscience. By the time class was out I could feel the vibrations and breaths that come from good psychedelics, but couldn't tell if I had merely been duped by a hippy-dippy placebo effect.
Along the way home, tulips, roses, and dainty orange petal affairs invoked an attention usually reserved for discriminately human enterprises -these flowers were fuckin’ sexy. Each one seemed fleshy and inviting in ways that arose deep suspicion in me- and so I fled. The crest of road gave way to a humble view of Chattanooga couched within mountains glazed with foliage and sunshine, penetrated naturally by a slow blue highway that carried more irradiated water into the Ohio. Trucks could be seen traversing far off ridges like so many ants, mindless and regal.
Arriving home, I downed two more- popping the watermelon candy into my mouth, feeling lysergic acid tickle my taste buds with tittered tales of trippy days past. Good shit as the youth say. It was totally tasteless, the not-flavor now a familiar phantom in my young brain which had, in the past few hours, collected from various entities and beings the following substances: corona and budweiser, an eight-ball of the ol’ white-girl, eight doses of what was supposedly LSD, enough speed to keep my comrade and I wired for two days of first-degree animal-kingdom slaughter, a good bit of fungi, and also a quarter of some green stuff called strawberry Afghan cough kush -but that goes without saying of course. Did you know more Americans smoke grass than tobacco? Poor Mr. Sessions, his is truly a sisyphean task.
My companion for this adventure was a preternatural ape named Jim, aspirant neuro-something with an encyclopedic brain and superb taste in all things related to hedonism and debauchery. He turns 21 tomorrow and it’s far overdue what with most bars dogged insistence on checking your ID every time you need a beer in this twisted nation. When one is operating on the beatnik scene, such a fellow is a rare and invaluable social commodity. He could ramble off the various bioavailability of any intoxicant categorized by method of delivery and brand-name. (A useful side-effect of his college education in psychology) Now he was to be unleashed upon the decent honest folk of little Port St. Joe with unlimited access to legally consumable alcohol, the most dangerous drug known to man. I had known Jim for three years, a tall somna-bitch with a slowly growing bald patch on the back of his head. Our destination was a condo on the Gulf in a holy speck of god-forsaken sand and soil called nowadays “Florida” but only Old Scratch knows the real label.
The objective, as stated in the subtitle, is to further enforce our species dominance over nature in a ritual called shark fishing. We would go out in kayaks with rods, reels and gaffing sticks, chumming the water behind us to attract the ‘biggest biters’ we could find. But I have to stop writing for now, Jim and Wes are almost back, then it will be a last bowl of cheese, hop in the car, a dash for some last minute supplies -Sailor Jerry rum- then on the road for seven to nine hours depending on how brave we think the cops between us and the ocean are. I still have to shit, take out the trash, chug water, and try to remember where I will inevitably forget my keys.