I have never trusted drugs.

Even as a teenager, when marijuana drifted through parties and studios with the inevitability of incense, I felt oddly resistant to it. Friends would sink into couches speaking with great seriousness about expanded consciousness while I mostly felt dulled, detached, less connected to the vividness of the world. It wasn’t morality. It wasn’t fear exactly. I simply preferred ordinary consciousness.

Reality already seemed strange enough.

Over the years LSD appeared several times in my life like a persistent dinner invitation I kept politely declining. Mushrooms too. The opportunities arrived through artists, musicians, intellectuals, old hippies, young technologists, and once through a sculptor who looked uncannily like a medieval saint but drove a rusted Indian motorcycle he spoke about with near-religious devotion. Somehow I always stepped back.

I remember one night at twenty, while attending Air National Guard technical school in Illinois, there was a party at the far end of the barracks. Someone was passing around LSD. One small square eventually found its way into my palm.

I remember staring at it for an absurdly long time.

A couple minutes.
Then five.
Then maybe ten.

I was just a kid really. Frightened of the military, frightened of the future, frightened of doing something irreversible before I had the slightest idea who I actually was. Finally, almost apologetically, I handed it back.

Part of the hesitation came from watching my own generation build a mythology around psychedelics that never entirely convinced me. People spoke about finding God, dissolving the ego, becoming one with the universe. None of that appealed to me in the slightest. In fact, I feared it.

At twenty-six I had already walked away from religion while studying the Enlightenment. Not casually. Deliberately. Around that time, assisted by that same sculptor, I climbed onto a cross as we confronted the irrational fear of God. Reason, history, inquiry, skepticism — these became more convincing companions to me than revelation. Voltaire made more sense than Saint Paul.

Thank God for that.

The strange thing is that my life afterward still became filled with things many people might call surreal. Giant installations populated with living organisms. Internet performances in the early nineties. Virtual worlds. AI dialogues with historical ghosts. Imagined conversations with Mary Shelley generated through predictive language systems. Public rituals around fire. Rooms full of artists talking until two in the morning as though consciousness itself were trying to think collectively through a temporary human arrangement.

Perhaps because of this, I never felt deprived by ordinary reality. Reality already contained more recursion, ambiguity, symbolism, absurdity, longing, and beauty than I could fully process.

Still, at seventy-seven, questions begin gathering around you differently.

You start quietly inventorying existence itself.

What doors remain unopened?
What experiences belong to your generation’s mythology that you somehow bypassed?
Was there something important hidden there?
Some territory of perception I had stubbornly avoided?

Yesterday I finally decided to find out.