The above is the only photo I have of me from back then, hanging with my Boy Ryan Gosling. A friend of mine at the time. The above photo was taken about 3 months after I shaved my hair off on day 10 of the Detox. More on my boy RG and me can be found at this link.
For some weird reason it’s my top ranking story
So….
On arrival back to Auckland, I essentially crawled back to the Life Improvement Center on my lips.
With a brain the consistency of fried chicken with a side of mashed potatoes I told them I was ready to start my detoxification journey into a healthy drug free life.
POW!
Well the first thing I did was an interview and medical check to see the level of toxins in my system, which would decide if I could start right away.
It was too much … from 16 years old it had been an ounce or two of grass a week, hundreds of doses of LSD, magic mushrooms, poison toadstools, speed, opium, amyl nitrate, nutmeg, morning glory seeds, datura, mescaline, wine, and hard booze…
… most of it of it still stored in my tissues…cycling up through my brain and giving me drug induced psychosis on a bad day and on a good one, flashbacks and a mystical dream like feeling towards life where all was unreal…
Oh and I had that ONE beer on my recent birthday.
I was not allowed to start the program right away lest I drop dead.
I had to “Dry Out” for two weeks.
This entailed thrice daily vitamin and mineral hits, liquid calcium and magnesium, calming walks, three good meals, good rest and doing some basic Life Skills and Communication training.
I was staying with the Girlfriends mothers and they were ostensibly supporting me on my Journey.
I was sleeping 10-12 hours a day, reading the Bhagavad Gita, that I got from my Hari Krishna pals, eating at a lot of Vegan restaurants and being calm.
This guy gets it…
It was very scary. Raw Dogging life. No filter.
Just the Grim meathook realities that Hunter S Thompson warned me about.
Was I now a permanent cripple? A failed seeker? One who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.
I was so munted mentally I rarely spoke, I just tried to smile and be the calm center of the world.
But sadly no amount of Zen Quotes or Hippie catchphrases seemed to help me at this point.
Lord Krishna didn’t give a shit about me, that was for sure.
I just keep pushing forward. One Day at at time.
I started the Detox and it was intense.
Supplements, Saunas, exercise, good food, rest, liquid body rebuilding potions.
The Drugs started coming out on day 1.
I tripped balls, every day as the procedure broke up and unleashed the drugs in my body and sent them back into my bloodstream.
I had body stoned comas similar to those I experienced from eating weed cakes black with resin.
My skin and piss actually took on a green tinge at one point.
I coughed up black sooty shunt from the depths of my lungs.
Every morning when I woke up I felt like I had drunk a gallon of bong water, and come down from a Quadruple Tab rave weekend and at which I drank nothing but bong water.
But bit by bit, I began to feel better.
On day ten I realized I could smell the mold in my matted beaver tail dread.
I shaved my head to the skin.
My sense of smell and taste went through the roof. I could smell a cigarette on the wind from 300 yards, detect if a woman was in heat, instantly notice anyones sneaky farts, and other preternatural abilities.
My eyesight improved markedly. The world became crisp and sharp.
On day 15 I threw away all my old clothes which reeked of death to me now, and the many burn holes from all the joint ashings were visible to my sharp eyes.
I bought myself a uniform of sorts so my outer world would match my inner world.
Grey cotton tracksuit pants, a light grey hoodie and white sneakers.
The drugs and the evil continued to pour out of me daily.
On around day 30 my sex drive exploded.
I realized I had been neutering myself with the amount of drugs I had been doing.
The girl and I were having sex about once every ten days.
For a healthy 21 year old in the 90s this is the sexual equivalent of being castrated.
Now I wanted it the normal amount.
Which apparently was, once in the morning on waking rock hard, once in the middle of the day and the once more in the shared shower before bed…
And then maybe once more, in bed.
My sick Girl, filled to the eyeballs with soymilk, tofu, drugs and wine, her occasional period and sex drive were of no consequence to her.
I was starting to drive her crazy. I didn’t want to keep hounding the poor lass….
So I decided to just lock up the sex drive and focus on my new life.
I had also dropped off the map from all my old druggie friends, but she of course was relaying them the crazy shit I was saying about drugs being bad, what I looked like now, and the scary fact that my eyes seemed to glow.
Buried under the drugs, my eyes were a piercing light blue, and now as my organs were cleared up they took an an incredible brightness.
On day 40 I completed the program, and felt reborn.
I was calm, healthy, drug free, educated in the ways of how to function in the human realm, and I had fashioned myself a new personality.
A calm, friendly, loving caring, man of peace and happiness. Who sets a good example and is a productive member of New Zealand society.
I would look at people with my magic sparkly eyes, smile and say things like
“I understand.”
“I not judging you, for what your doing. I’m just choosing to live in a way I feel is better for me.”
“Everyone is more or less right from their viewpoint.”
“What is truth?”
I had spent over a month daily with good happy people who were not half nuts druggies…
This world was very new to me.
I of course swung SO HARD, the other way that It even concerned the people at the Life improvement centre, though they didn’t say anything.
My new perceptions could sense it…
But the world was gunna have to get used to the new me… cause this is how I’m rollin…
I was no longer, drinking, smoking, having sex or whacking it, doing any drugs, watching TV or movies, reading fiction, listening to music, swearing, eating meat, ranting, judging people, being mean or having unkind thoughts, objectifying women, engaging in pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, sloth or idle chatter.
You get the idea. I was now the MONK, on the path of the RIGHTEOUS MAN!
In the first week after wrapping up the program some shit went down.
My gal was now drinking and doing drugs daily to “Cope with the fucking stress of you changing so much!”
Driven mental by the lack of fights and being laid off from her main job of stopping me from doing really stupid shit, and slammed by my sudden absolute change, and now my refusal to fuck her, she had started to lose it.
As a man it’s not kind to repeatedly refuse offers of sex from a gal.
Guy are used to it…
Being knocked back has a deleterious effect on a woman’s psyche.
She had made a few desperate attempts to get me going again after the third knock back.
A mouth on my cock while I was asleep, and a naked leap at me that ended in a distressingly tearful begging session.
Some other super racy things were tried to get me going… I’m not going to describe them in detail, but they invoved her creating sexy shows for me to suddenly walk in on in the bedroom.
I told her we wouldn’t be having sex again until I felt I was ready, and no more showers together, because I only had cold showers now..….
This pushed her over the edge.
On Tuesday a tongue ring, for amazing blow jobs, she explained.
On Wednesday, nipple rings, to enhance sexual pleasure…
On friday, a sexy dragon tatoo on her shoulder.
Now this was some intense shit for someone to do back in 97, and all in one week no less… not like today… where if your in your 20s and live in like maybe Brooklyn or LA…? You look strange if you DON’T have all that going on …
None of these things worked on me, so on Sunday morning she shaved her beautiful long blond hair off, then razored it to the skin like an absolute boss.
Thats always a good sign. A women fully shaving her head means she’s on a good run, knows the boyfriend loves her so much he is about to propose… or she got the great job…
Now my poor gal was a ringed up, tatted skinhead whos two dark raccoon eyes looked out from a face looked like a swollen red pumpkin from all the crying.
The black rings round her eyes from her hard partying life, and bad food choices, were usually concealed with thick makeup… now she didn’t give a shit.
She was 6 foot 1. But now she walked hunched over, when she wasn’t bed rotting. Spiraling down into a black abyss of depression that my cheery Life Improvement slogans made zero impact on.
She was not willing to give up drugs, get a job or go back to University.
She was just going to rot in bed and cry, blaze weed and drink her mums wine.
Her mother just let her rot, she had failed to help her for the last 20 years and was such a miserable divorced husk herself she knew hope for either of them.
I was the light of that house, kept happy, being super nice and eating the yummy food.
I refused to let any of that get me down, because as my gal Sarah Connor taught me…
No Fate, But what we Make.
She did not have the strength to kick me to the curb.
I truly thought my positivity would eventually penetrate and she would do the Detox, get off the drugs and be reborn, like a hot sexy, healthy and ethical angel.
Wrong.
I had not seen my friends since the Gathering, and so it was that I went to visit them.
I would show them the new me and they would rejoice.
I had some pamphlets, that talked about the Detox Program… maybe I could get everyone off drugs…
What hit me first was the smell.
B.O, stale weed, spilt bong water… mold… rot…dog piss, the awesome smell of ciggies put out in beer bottles…
The lounge looked like it smelled of sick. I never had noticed this before.
On the stinking sagging couch was Buzzy and John.
Buzzy was a long time stoner mate, who worked at a plant store, and john was a 17 year old hanger on and Buzzy’s apprentice in debauchery.
Moldering pizza boxes stacked to the Ceiling. Beer Bottles everywhere, the coffee table covered in ash and fast food wrappers…
They were hitting Buzzy’s pride and joy “Mr Wong”. A large white porcelain bong in the shape of a huge cock.
Buzzy loved to make gay insinuendos when someone smoked it.
If you need to google image search “Penis shaped Bong” go for it. I’ll wait.
It was on that evil couch that I had the three fateful bong rips that precipitated me not starting the detox earlier, and sending me off ona month long surf trip culminating in a bender in which I went bat shit crazy.
-
Over two months prior I had announced my plan…
“I’m going to do a Health Program and Get fully clean and become a proud member of society. Get a good Job, maybe start a landscaping company, and only smoke a bit of weed on weekends, but mostly stick to beer. Might even start wearing jeans… ”
The following conversation went like this:
Buzzy: ”You sound brainwashed man. Those guys really did a number on you. You have already started changing.”
Me :
“Have not…”
John: : “The YOU we know would never fall for shit like that. You must have been in shock from the break up”
Me: “ What a load of shit! Im fine. This is what I want”
John: “Are you sure… you don’t sound sure… you sound panicked and nuts.”
Buzzy: “Yeah bro… look If you have three big bong rips, then we will know you aren’t brainwashed… otherwise you are.”
…
Well now there they were on that stinking sagging couch again… and I was standing before them Drug Free and Resplendent… trying to to judge.
They were reading High Times, pulling cones and talking about how they are going to go to save up and Amsterdam. I used to sit on that same couch with Buzzy reading High Times, pulling cones and talking about we going to save up and go to Amsterdam…
Spoiler alert. No one ever went to Amsterdam.
In the room with us, barking at the rats that lived in behind the pizza boxes were Tripod and Cyclops.
They were Buzzy’s small mangey dogs. Tripod was called such due to having three legs. Buzzy had backed over Tripod with his car and the leg had been amputated. Tripods name until that incident had been Max.
Cyclops had been called Rocky before he had been bitten in the face by a rat, causing an infection in his eye which had to be surgically removed.
So it was quite a scene as you can imagine, two little mangy dogs one one eyed and one three legged barking at rats behind moldy pizza boxes, in a house that reeked of ass, my friends sucking on a big white bong cock and making mean wise cracks about how Im now just a tool of the man, and I had become everything that I once hated… and honestly they felt just a bit of pity, that I could have let this happen to me, because once I was so cool.
I remained calm, and looked at them with my magic sparkly eyes and said:
“I understand”
“I not judging you, for what your doing. I’m just choosing to live in a way I feel is better for me.”
“Everyone is more or less right from their viewpoint.”
“What is truth?”
The Detox brochures sat forgotten in my bag.. my dream of helping them crushed…
The bedroom door opened and Buzzy’s girl came into the lounge to pound Mr Wong.
Wearing only a worn and faded Cure shirt and panties.
She was a malnourished stick of a girl, hard on the booze and drugs and a city vegan.
City vegan means just ate things like chips and tofu burgers and candy bars.
She was sick as fuck, and explained she had recovered from a hard bad couple of days on some very moldy opium tea, mixed with Valium that her and a friend had brewed up.
I used to be prideful of people pounding concoctions like this.
Now I just looked at her and said “I understand.”
She put her whole mouth around Mr Wong and tried to give me a sexy look.
The weed sent her into a coughing fit which she tried to restrain, while holding in the smoke as to not waste it.
A wet farting sound came from the back of her panties as a shit spray was precipitated.
She yelled FUCK - and went beet red - coughing and wetly farting
I turned and left them to it.
A week later I decided I needed to:
TAKE A STAND FOR WHAT I BELIEVED IN NOW.
People love it when their newly drug free righteous friend takes a stand right?
With all their new energy and sparkly eyes and hope!?
I will detail how NUTS my taking a stand was… so tune in to the next episode.
Swallowed, borrowed
Heavy about everything
But my love
Swallowed, hollowed
Sharp about everyone
But yourself…
HOOK UP A POST GRUNGE DRIFTER with a Kombucha
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