Alignment with the Columnar Spine of the Universe

When I was younger, I used to drop acid because I enjoyed the fruity bursts of reflection that would bombard my consciousness as if they were so many cherry bombs in the hands of idle schoolboys. As an exercise, I tried to keep notes on cigarette foils and the backs of notebooks, but thoughts flooded past me like the rush of interplanetary travel and I never could keep up. At peak time, I could get lost in the bathroom for hours, watching the contrasting patterns of bathroom tiles and hand towel ribbing reveal to me profound momentary truths about the universe.

I recall my first time dropping acid. It was with a guy I didn’t know so well, but he was dating a girl I knew who used to be a next door neighbor of that little boy that got kidnapped up in the northern suburbs. You know, the one they never found, but there was always talk that the parents were involved in some kind of secret cult and the kid got offered up in some kind of ceremony. Anyway, this guy and I, we planted ourselves underneath a bridge that spanned two adjoining lakes: Lake Calhoun and Lake of the Isles. There was car traffic on top, then a small path underneath where joggers and bikers were kept separate from one another by a thin white line that ran along the pavement.

We dropped at almost midnight, then curled up together at a side of the tunnel, watching the world go by as if we were reliving a more passive enactment of the Three Billy Goats Gruff. The intensity of the dose made my body tense into a coil. I don’t believe I could have stood up, even if I’d had the inclination to. I was a marionette, strings contracted into a tangle.

Like a flight to Europe, the peak and subsequent easing took about seven hours, which we spent entirely under this bridge. What was remarkable, from our position dead center, was that dawn and dusk were frozen at opposite ends of the tunnel, as if they had been pasted on at the mouths if each stony arch. Looking left, I saw the rosy nostalgia of evening settling down with a dark blush. To the right was the hopeful eye of the morning peeking shyly at us.

Each time I shifted position, I could feel the hefty stirrings of my circadian rhythms as they tried to accommodate the time change. If I alternated head positions quickly - left-right, left-right, left-right – I felt woozy, felt as though radical philosophical displacements were happening in the very liquids of my inner ear. Felt as though I were a sliver in the hand of god, a hair caught in the eye of the whirring of the universe. Here I was, an auxiliary verb at best – no – like a minor dialectical inflection of an auxiliary verb - between the mighty posturing of the two substantial nouns that begin and end the day – dawn and dusk. Dusk and dawn. Left and right and my thoughts tumbling over into the secret of this tunnel, where startled joggers were even then glancing at us over their shoulders as they mended this broken seam in time with their wagging legs.