That Otherworld to Which I Once Traveled

I have, throughout my life, experimented with a wide array of psychoactive compounds. Some of my experiences (generally those with psychedelics) have been divinely beautiful in a way that is impossible to put into words, and are the closest thing that I, a secular man, have come to a religious experience. Some of my experiences have been merely fun. A couple have been thoroughly unpleasant. Most have probably been detrimental to my physical health, to some degree. All of them are part of what has made me into the man I am today, complex and flawed.

My first meaningful experiences with serious drugs (as opposed to alcohol or cannabis, although you could well argue that either or both of those are pretty serious) were as a teenager, with MDMA. Or rather, with what was commonly called ecstasy back then. The distinction in terminology, at least where I lived, came down to composition. Pure MDMA was a usually brownish powder that got packed into little gel capsules, and was the primary ingredient in pressed ecstasy tablets, which would also contain proprietary cocktails of various amphetamines, cocaine, and god knows what other stimulants. We had no way of knowing exactly what was in those pills, but would develop heuristics based off our experiences with different colours and imprinted branding ("blue dolphin," "red buddha," etc). This was a highly imprecise science, as producers could easily plagiarize each other's presentation without faithfully reproducing the contents.

For a handful of years as a teenager, I was a full blown rave kid. Having moved out on my own at the age of 17 (broken home, high-school dropout, working night shifts at a downtown restaurant to support myself), I was more or less free to do whatever I wanted so long as I was employed and paying my bills on time. My meagre paycheck and an interest in staying out of jail were my only limitations. So I lived like an unhinged degenerate.

Kitchens, at the time, were conducive to that kind of lifestyle; so long as you showed up on time and could pump out a dinner rush while keeping up a constant stream of witty invective, profanity, and homoerotic banter with your kitchen mates, no one really cared what you did with your life outside the restaurant. Your ability to function and produce within the insular culture of the kitchen was all that mattered, and that culture had its own twisted internal logic. It was a lot of fun for a young man of a certain bent, and something that I could never return to. There's a reason you don't see a lot of greybeards in the kitchen. At best you age out of it; at worst it kills you.

Thus, for a few years my life consisted of fire and knives and yelling and sweat within a cramped stainless steel box, paycheck-to-paycheck living in decrepit basement suites and, once a month, raves.

These wild all-night parties were a portal into a mind-bendingly different world; one that didn't actually exist, but could be visited in the trance-like state induced by drugs, electronic music, and eight hours of near-continuous dancing. It was a world of orgiastic euphoria, peak sensory stimulation, and a sense of deep emotional connection with a dance hall full of strangers, assembled from the dark corners of the city to travel this insane, night-long journey together.

Girls hypersexualized their appearance; sports bras, booty shorts, fishnet, leather. Lasers and strobe lights gleaming off of skin slick with sweat. Pheremones hanging thick in the humid heat of the dance floor, as a few hundred frenzied youth moved to the primal, thumping rythm. The sensation of the music was like jacking into the fundamental frequency of the universe, whereupon it harmonized with the drugs coursing through your veins until your body sang like a divine tuning fork.

During occasional breaks in the cool night air outside, conversation flowed uncommonly freely as the drugs lowered our natural inhibitions and made us feel almost as if we were one connected organism. People you would have never spoken to otherwise suddenly became intensely interesting and sympathetic, and everyone was riding high on a supremely positive and wholesome wavelength.

Hypersexualization notwithstanding, there was none of the creepy, pervy vibe of a nightclub where alcohol reigns supreme. MDMA is a drug of connection, not sex. We just wanted to talk to and know each other. Friendships were made on a whim, vanishingly few of which would last beyond the coming morning. But that wasn't the point. We understood on some level that this imaginary world would evaporate with the dawn, as would the connections we made within it, and that was fine; it was only ever meant to exist for one discontinuous night at a time.

I don't know what those thirty-odd nights out of my life ultimately meant, but they meant something. They were experiences of their particular time and place; a time long past and a place that never truly existed. Brief forays into an otherworld of such searing intensity that it would kill you to stay too long, but you go anyways just to see what it's like on the other side.

My time in that world was short; I seek other planes of reality now. Where before I looked sideways off the path to mirages and illusions, now I look forward, to worlds that do not yet exist, but might, if I have the vision and resolve to make them manifest. A more free, honest, and noble future, where no man or woman must suffer the indignities of enslavement to a corrupt, kleptocratic class of institutionalised currency counterfeiters. This is the otherworld to which I now travel, in tiny painstaking steps.

I'll see you when we get there.