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Acid and LSD are the same thing. I’ve met a lot of people who get confused and all puffed up over this, they try to argue the difference, but they are incorrect. Football is soccer, Boomers are mushrooms, and acid is LSD. Despite the grainy propaganda films I was shown in high school health classes ranting the horrors of LSD-the dangerous visuals, the lost perception of reality, and the alleged dangers of flashbacks years later possibly occurring while you’re riding a bike, flying a helicopter, or performing surgery-despite this, I was eager to embrace the drug as soon as possible.

Once exposed in the world, it was better to get completely out of my mind on whatever was available as an excuse to not care. I blame gym class. Once I realized some truths which should have became self evident to the gym teachers, I stopped trying in gym class. And it was either pretend that I was a punk in order to show the jocks and coaches how little I cared about running laps and doing jumping jacks, or get completely involved with drugs. And I couldn’t stand the new wave of punk music, so six months after I had smoked marijuana for the first time I took three copper tasting pieces of paper in my friends back yard.

It was an escape. For a young man in the pre and post 9/11 world, it was the only and the most extreme sacrament to transcend the frivolous and narrow mindedness which was daily life in the American Northeast. And as a self proclaimed poet in a time when proclaiming yourself a poet was considered pretty gay, it seemed to be the simplest way to legitimize myself as an artist. So I embraced it with open arms, and the crowd I romped around with embraced it as well, because we had so much free time, and so little sense of accomplishment, that we'd search for something to fill that gap at all costs. Anything.

We perceived fully, all too well actually, the impermanence of human life and the inevitability of bodily harm and the loss of fleshly pleasure. It was these terrifying notions which fed our mantra of unequal equilibrium, of excess, and of unconscious self destruction for the sake of accomplishment and deliverance. Also, we were just really fucking bored.

There was wandering happiness scattered all over the place, probably from a time which we failed to recognize, and wouldn't recognize again until we were dying and bound to relive it again in the endless cycle of what Buddhists call Samsara. But we still looked everywhere for it all along the towns of our youth which we were occupying by default.

So we smoked dope in the woods behind our well manicured lawns, and stole music players and bottles of wine from supermarkets. We’d pick cigarettes out of ashtrays and smoke them in parking lots, saying we wanted to upset the upper middle class folk buying their groceries, but really we just wanted a piece of their attention. We’d sit under a bridge in a cemetery lighting small fires and complaining, or we’d drive around with bottles of whiskey in the back seat slashing strangers’ tires because we had to get our kicks some way in a town where the grass was better fed than most people and even the poor were fat and played youth sports. While our Italian and Irish parents drank their Sundays away at pretentious cook outs after church on the weekends among a bunch of bores who didn’t stand out at all, we set off to disrupt their picturesque accomplishments before the snow fell and we’d have to spend the winter smoking inside restaurants until they kicked us out. The west is where people go to start new lives. The east is where people are perfecting their current one.