An admission, to get it out of the way: I did drugs. A lot. But if you want to dismiss everything that happened to me as merely drug-induced hallucinations, explain how it was that LSD helped Crick discover the structure of DNA? And why, when I quit using drugs, that the visions still came? Just saying I was on drugs doesn’t explain everything. But this goes somewhere: as my story goes, back in my junior year of college, I was in my studio apartment in Pittsburgh, and it was the weekend. So I was dropping acid. It was a relatively “normal” trip, until at one point, I looked out the window, and it wasn’t Pittsburgh. It wasn’t earth. There were suddenly bars over my window, where normally… not so much.
Philip K. Dick wrote about a… place… called the Black Iron Prison. That was my own first experience of it. It was an evil environs, the sky was dark but dim with red, the buildings of an architecture of claws clasped over the joints of all the black iron, of which every exterior was composed. And there was something unnamed above, which you didn’t want to notice you. I was convinced I was in Hell, you know, “Abandon all hope,” and so forth… Anyway, I visited the place a few times, and the last time I was there, I got out when I heard a whisper, like someone were letting me in on the secret: “Walt Disney is God.” That will become important later.
But it turns out that never was a Hell, only that a Black Iron Prison was superimposed over the world, visible only in a psychedelic nightmare. It can seem like Hell, though, even if you don’t feel an ounce of pain during your stay there. If you look in the painting, Garden of Delights, by Bosch, in the third panel, “Hell”, you can see in the very far back the building I visited when I was imprisoned for a short time each time there. And each time I was rescued by trip’s end, back to party down another day. This was before things got serious, leading to when the visions became a permanent fixture in my life…
…but Judas Iscariot, does it not say that he was the one that was lost? What became of him?
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