A Story About Sunshine

So last night I was talking with John about DXM, and how, though the ways it affected us were both very different, it still served as something of a catalyst to break us both free of certain mental prisons we had been stuck in prior to having experienced it. And I was thinking of writing about my first DXM experience, and how it changed my life forever afterwards (in a tremendously positive way).

But then, for some reason, I got to thinking about Sunshine, and... well... that's also a story that needs to be told.

And John, if you read this... I know you hated Sunshine and his patchouli-scentedness, but... you have to understand the complete story.

Sunshine was one of the defining elements of last year's Chuck's Farm. There are many, many such defining elements; he was only one of them. Chuck's Farm can't really be described in memories or vignettes; certain things just stick out in your mind. For instance, one of the defining elements of Chuck's Farm '06 was me, zwarked out of my mind on acid, DOB (I think that's probably what it was...), nitrous, pot, and probably heroin by that point, watching some dirty, middle-aged literal-hillbilly farmer angrily chasing a piglet around while calling it a "scrongly shittum".

These are the memories that last a lifetime. But I'm digressing.

The aforementioned pig episode happened on A Saturday At Chuck's Farm, as did Sunshine. The capitalization is justified if you've been there.

Friday Night At Chuck's Farm is as follows. You hit up the sketched-out, Howard-Stern-looking old head in the van for his ridiculously good quality acid (which, as I said, was also DOB the one year). You eat way too much of it, forget why you're in the woods (you're looking for firewood), listen to people making music that makes the universe give birth to itself inside your head, talk with your friends about the moon eventually just GOING AWAY and about the way planets smell, figure out a little bit more about why in the world we're all here on this miserable rock and how to make the best of it, and generally have a fantastic time while you're at it.

Then the Funrise occurs. The Funrise is John's way of not speaking about the sunrise, which heralds a number of dark and horrible things. Chief among which is the fact that eventually the acid wears off and you realize you're sitting in the middle of a goddamn field, literally 30 minutes driving distance from anything resembling a town, with maybe 7-20 of your close friends and probably about two thousand complete strangers, all of whom are on drugs, and many of whom are carrying guns.

And you also realize that with all the drug-taking and loud music and fireworks going on, you're not going to get any sleep at all for the second night in a row, and this is a problem when you remember that there is some sort of "Real World" out there beyond the borders of this bacchanalian anarchist utopia... and said "Real World" requires that you get up for work on Monday morning.

This is Saturday At Chuck's Farm.

Last year was no different. I spent the better part of Saturday morning and afternoon blissed out on my newfound serenity, having tangled with four hits of LSD the van guy said he had saved from 1968, from a Grateful Dead tour, and come out the victor. I have no idea whether or not this is true, but I do know this... it was STRONG. But, eventually, as my time without sleeping was approaching the 30-hour mark, and I had the strong, and later confirmed, suspicion that that time would double before I met the sweet embrace of sleep once more, I started to get the Saturday At Chuck's Farm Disease.

Usually this consists of thoughts of "why in the world did I do this, I'll never do this again if you let me out of here still sane" (even though you do it the next chance you get) and grandiose schemes to hitchhike to some form of civilization, before you realize you lost your debit card, you spent most of your cash-at-hand on things that made you see colors, and you'd still have 3 hours of transit time before you could sleep anyway.

It was in this state of mind that I met Sunshine.

Sunshine was a drug dealer. Or, as he put it, a "gangster."

A Hawaiian gangster, mind you.

I don't remember exactly how we met, except that he had somehow fallen into the gravity of the Magical Adventure Club 3000, as do all strange and wonderful things. I do remember staggering out of the tent after sunset, having drank a prodigious amount of scotch in a failed attempt at sleep. Gabe and Sunshine were sitting around the campfire, talking. I decided to share the remainder of my pot with them in the hopes that maybe that would put me to sleep. No dice, of course.

The sleepless horror that is Saturday Night At Chuck's Farm makes you realize one thing and one thing alone: all we have is each other. And if you didn't know how before, you learn to make conversation as if it was your last desperate hope towards sanity.. because it is. All you have to keep the nagging, post-acid thought-loops about how miserable you're going to be Monday morning at bay is the words and ideas of others.

So Gabe and Sunshine and I talked, for what seemed like forever.

I realized that whatever I had thought I knew about love and lust was mere child's play in the face of this bearish Hawaiian man's patchouli-scented animal passion for some girl whose dreadlocks "drove him insane". I think this is probably what John didn't like about him. (John?)

But then we started talking about DXM, and that's when things got really interesting.

Sunshine told me that he had taken so much DXM one time that he had started going up a flight of stairs, reached the top, and then, without any continuity whatsoever, found himself back where he started. He said that his life had split, at that point, into one reality that had kept going once it reached the top of the stairs, the reality that had gone on to find him talking to me at that moment, and another reality doomed to climb the stairs eternally.

And I knew exactly what he was talking about. I had been in a similar place once. I knew exactly what it meant for time to stop, to experience time as slices of static, unchanging moments, one cel in an animation after another, all totally disparate. I had experienced these "slices of time" both from an outside observer's perspective, and from within, trapped in bizarre, non-geometric entanglements with emotionless cyclopean anthropoid things, electric femininity, and inanimate objects, for all eternity. And for all I know, in some reality, some other me is still there.

I don't know what's weirder.. that I've met a Hawaiian gangster named Sunshine... or that I connected with him on such a deep, existential level.

Life is strange.