Only in Fred and Barney’s wildest dreams. 

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These are C.F.’s little white hounds.

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This pack belongs to J.J.

A picture of the newest little Pomeranian.

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Especially with all this domestic spying going on in the U.S.A. by the N.S.A. who is in cahoots with the C.I.A and F.B.I., not to forget the D.E.A. which is chasing producers of L.S.D., who sell to athletes in the N.F.L, U.F.C. and N.B.A.

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In 2008 a couple with the last name Sigler built a dome house in Pensacola, Florida.  It was built with the intention of surviving the frequent hurricanes that blast in from the Gulf of Mexico into the Florida panhandle.  And in 2004 the house was tested by Hurricane Ivan.  The dome house won.  But not many of the conventional homes near the dome fared as well. Major damage to those houses.  It just shows that if ingenuity is utilized many big natural hazards can be neutralized.

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Right after Hurricane Ivan

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Nice interior design

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Dangerous Minds

 

 

As an introduction to Martin Witz’s outstanding documentary on Albert Hoffman, The Substance, I thought I’d share my experience of ingesting 20,000 mics or so of White Lightening acid when I was 16 years old – my first religious experience and one that reverberates through my being still to this day.  It was a typically hot and humid Washington D.C. afternoon in 1967 and John and I were packing what was reputed to be Owsley’s latest batch of White Lightening acid into gelatin caps. The source was close to Owsley and the quality was certainly of Owsley’s caliber. We had no reason to believe it was anything less. John was my high school English teacher and he had good connections in San Francisco. He’d fly there regularly to purchase the latest batch of acid from Owsley’s people: Licorice-flavored Batman acid, purple tabs, orange tabs, white tabs, window pane, blotter, white powder…Was it all certified Owsley. We liked to think so.

Filling double 0 caps with fine LSD-laced powder was tricky business. We wore surgical gloves and masks so the acid wouldn’t get into our mouths or the pores of our skin. White Lightening was extremely pure and powerful LSD and the pile we were working with contained several thousand doses (at approx. 500 mics per dose). It wasn’t a precise system but we were careful. Packing the caps just so, not too tight, not too loose.

At one point, we stopped to take a break. There was a fan in the room that kept the humid air circulating and relatively dry. It was cautiously pointed away from the table. I had taken off my mask to get some air and was feeling slightly high from being exposed to some of the powder. John was feeling higher and did something stupid or, depending on how look at it, divine. He got up and absent-mindedly turned the fan in the direction of the table and the pile of acid. The White Lightening immediately became a psychedelic dust storm spinning toward my face and into my mouth and eyes. I ran to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked Marcel Marceau. But this wasn’t clown makeup. This was several thousand micrograms of high grade LSD. I blurted  out “oh shit” and it was punctuated by a puff of white dust.

I started splashing my face with water, irrigating my eyes and washing out my mouth. But, it didn’t help. The acid was kicking in and I began the ultimate ego death trip.

Timothy Leary said if you didn’t go through a death trip experience on LSD you hadn’t taken enough. Well, I had. I sat on John’s living room floor and for what seemed like an eternity (and it was, relatively speaking) I died, was reborn, died again, born again, flipping the metaphysical television dial from cosmic station to cosmic station, whipping through the Bardo planes while hungry ghosts growled and laughed and mocked and danced and poked at me with their long ancient galactic fingers, chakras opening/closing, kundalini doing the serpent power mambo up my spinal cord, heart unfolding like a giant pulsing red lotus. I was passing through dimensions not even Rod Serling could imagine. Walls shimmered and breathed, rainbows everywhere, mandalas spinning like heavenly roulette wheels…I was so fucking high!  And as far OUT and IN as I went, I remained calm. I was so overwhelmed that my ego made no attempt to resist. I was without fear. I felt at one with everything: huge, expansive, complete and unbounded, totally absorbed by the entirety of the Universe. GOD, or whatever you want to call it, wasn’t somewhere out there, it was suffusing me, penetrating me and I was dissolving into its essence. I was in that moment of complete union with all things. I was no longer functioning as a separate entity; there was no fear because the one who did the fearing no longer existed. I was complete in my absolute non-existence. This was the white light experience where the ego is absorbed into the infinite molecular dance of absolute reality.

Enlightenment doesn’t happen to you because there’s no “you” for it to happen to. Enlightenment is there always. It’s that door of perception you walk through and suddenly disappear into. One moment you’re on the diving board. The next, you’re in the ocean.

12 hours later as I started to “come down”, I felt exhausted but refreshed, renewed and reborn. Within a matter of days, I returned to being my usual egocentric little self. But, I had had a genuine religious experience, one that has lingered throughout the years and one I often return to in small ways to put things into their proper perspective. LSD was wonderful. I tremble still in awe of its magic and often dream of finding some really pure acid out there…if it still exists. The Church of My Brain could use a nice house-cleaning.

 

 

I tried the old acid back in the eighties.  Never had a bad trip, it was all good, actually very good.  Music for one was 20 times better.  When high on the psychedelic I appreciated the essence of everything, nothing was unimportant. Everything, from flowers to a brick wall, had a deep intrinsic value.  And all problems and stress disappeared, it is like they say, you were only in the immediate moment, the past or the future didn’t matter.  We would pop a few hits and go to punk gigs, the ensuing experience was exhilarating.  The roaring dynamic punk rock would go right through you.

But it wasn’t for everyone.  Some people would rekindle old negative baggage and get depressed.  Being depressed on acid is a potentially harmful state to be in. When taking acid a person has to be in a positive mood and in a friendly and safe setting. I had very interesting experiences on the stuff.

 

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By Kaushik

Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti is always traveling the world in search of adventure, good stories, and interesting people. For his latest project entitled “Toy Stories”, Galimberti photographed children from around the world with their most prized possesion. He did not expect to uncover much we did not already know. “At their age, they are pretty all much the same,” is his conclusion after 18 months working on the project. “They just want to play.”

But it’s how they play that seemed to differ from country to country. Galimberti found that children in richer countries were more possessive with their toys. “At the beginning, they wouldn’t want me to touch their toys, and I would need more time before they would let me play with them,” says the Italian photographer. “In poor countries, it was much easier. Even if they only had two or three toys, they didn’t really care. In Africa, the kids would mostly play with their friends outside.”

However, there are many similarities in which the kids regard their toys, especially when it comes to their function. Galimberti met a six-year-old boy in Texas and a four-year-old girl in Malawi who both maintained their plastic dinosaurs would protect them from the dangers that await them at night. More common was how the toys reflected the world each child was born into – the girl from an affluent Mumbai family loves Monopoly, because she likes the idea of building houses and hotels, while the boy from rural Mexico loves trucks, because he sees them rumbling through his village to the nearby sugar plantation every day. A Lativian kid plays with miniature cars because his mother drove a taxi, while the daughter of an Italian farmer has an assortment of plastic rakes, hoes and spades.

Working for Toy Stories, Galimberti learned as much about the parents as he learned about the children. Parents from the Middle East and Asia, he found, would push their children to be photographed even if they were initially nervous or upset, while South American parents were “really relaxed, and said I could do whatever I wanted as long as their child didn’t mind”.

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Watcharapom – Bangkok, Thailand

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Stella – Montecchio, Italy

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Ralf – Riga, Latvia

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Botlhe – Maun, Botswana

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Orly – Brownsville, Texas

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Noel – Dallas, Texas

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Maudy – Kalulushi, Zambia

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Li Yi Chen – Shenyang, China

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Chiwa – Mchinji, Malawi

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Davide – La Valletta, Malta

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Cun Zi Yi – Chongqing, China

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Arafa & Aisha – Bububu, Zanzibar

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Jaqueline – Manila, Philippines

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Tyra – Stockholm, Sweden