In a break with tradition and all rational thought your intrepid reporter, EPPdF, asks the voices inside his own head,

"On a scale of 1 - Batshit, exactly how crazy are you?"

Plus,

EPPdF stares into the darkness with an unflinching eye (and the darkness is surprisingly accommodating)


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I've only hallucinated twice before, and neither time was related to recreational drug use, but instead directly related to,
A.  Insomnia
2.  Ambien

After the break up with DumDum I had real trouble sleeping and I eventually turned to my local spiritual, psychological, and pharmaceutical advisor for help.

A short time later, dear "neighbor Fred" had to fish me out of the grumpy old cat lady's yard where I had gone to confront the dwarves that were shooting laser beams into my house.
She hasn't looked at me quite the same since.

On a more recent voyage, after the break up with Ms. X and due in no small part to the stress of the big job, I was just about to slip off into a long overdue 8 hour blissful coma of Ambien induced sleep when a branch driven by high winds slammed into the bedroom window.

It's fairly well documented that, when used properly, Ambien can be an extremely useful tool for coping with an inability to sleep normally due to medical issues, stress, or some other situational type insomnia.

But there's a narrow timeframe for it to work.

If you take it and then fall asleep say, in the next 20-30 minutes, no problem-o.
(Spanish for "so crazy it just might work")
But, if for instance a loud noise causes you to jump out of your bed/skin somewhere around the thirty minute mark, weird shit starts to happen (man).

On that particular night the weirdness doubled down.

It started with a simple -
"Well now the SWAT team is breaking down the door for no discernable reason" type dream/hallucination.

I know.
We've all had THAT one.
Geez.
What are we?
Amateurs?

But slowly it morphed into different versions of all of your favorite psycho-pharmaceutical nightmares, including, but not limited to:
1.)  "the house may or may not be on fire",
2.)  "I may or may not be eaten by a pack of wild dogs",
       and not to be outdone by any of the above,
3.)  "a visit from the Angel of Death" himself, who, was surprisingly philosophical about the whole deal.
      Actually the guy gets a bum rap with the whole "Grim Reaper" stuff.
      I mean, he did have the long black robes and the various accoutrements of your garden variety "Angel of Death, here to whisk your soul away to the netherworld", but his attitude was more Reverend Jim Ignatowski than sinister.

But the real kicker was the visage of my long passed father who had an unexpected walk on part in my little movie.

My earliest childhood memory is the day my father died.
I remember the paramedics taking him away and the sound of mother crying.

It's the type of thing that stays with a person a long time.

Dad's been gone for 40 years today but sometimes, on a bad day, I can be there watching it happen again.
I was a little shy of my third birthday then.
Relatives once told me that for the next year or two any man in uniform would receive a sharp rebuke from the young EPPdF.
I don't remember that at all, although I will concede a more than average dislike for authority.
Not sure that's a related thing.

So, while I was happy to see dad after such a long absence, he didn't seem quite so pleased to see his youngest son, especially at that particular moment, lost in the grips of an Ambien delirium.
The look could be best described as, "Not angry: just very, very disappointed."

Fair enough.

At the time of his appearance, I was laying on my back in the yard, listening to the wind sweep thru my body as I slowly "returned to the dust from whence I came".
At one point I could see the clouds thru the skin and bones of my right hand.
As my flesh peeled away in clouds of tiny particles - like little atoms of energy dispersing back to the world - I held it up and saw the moon and stars right thru it.
I was sort of detached about the whole process, even with the cacophony of noises ringing in my head.
It was less, "Holy crap this is the end!" and more,
"Well, what'daya'know?  Raiders of the Lost Ark was onto something".
Minus the Nazis of course.

Maybe it was a peyote flashback, maybe it was the the Ambien, or maybe it was just my general back alley mood of late, but I found a zen like peace in the center of that confused, nightmarish delirium.
I was in the center of both a physical and spiritual storm and I could feel a cold, wicked wind ripping thru the trees sending pine needles into my arms but once the initial fear passed, I thought, "Well, at least I'll get some rest out of this deal."
There was a second when all those burned out hippies seemed absolutely right in their belief that we are all just one consciousness - just pieces of the same ball of energy, separated only in our mind, and becoming one again when our physical body is no more.
Although, I have to admit that I was a little ticked that having finally summoned the spirit of my dearly departed dad, he had little to offer in terms of sage, fatherly counsel from the other side, and seemed much more interested in getting back to whatever it is that occupies his time in the spirit world.
I had a sense that there were others there with him.
A long line of shadows followed him back into the night and the sound of the howling wind roared in my ears.

Eventually, with pops and the "Angel of Death" gone, it seemed like a good idea to get up out of the grass, brush off the dirt and the odd visions, and go back inside, where I slept like a baby for the next 10 hours.

Life is funny that way.
It's been 40 years since dad died and I think, maybe in one way or another, the family is still dealing with the loss.
"The Source of the Trouble" was a 28 year old widow with 4 boys under the age of 10 to feed and care for by herself, so it's not hard to understand.
For me, dad was the big, white elephant in the room, the subject carefully avoided and only on rare occasions acknowledged.
When I was 6 or so, I remember digging up a pet cat that died after a run in with a car.
At the time I'm sure it looked like the act of a future Manson or Bundy but was really a child's misguided attempt to understand what happens when something dies.
What does it mean to be dead?
To be gone?
Where do you go?
Is this thing in the ground and the memories it left behind all there is?
What does it mean to have a God, a heaven, a spirit, an afterlife?

I still have those same questions, although after my little bout with brain cancer, they seem oddly less pressing.
Whatever the answer, I'm here now.
What comes next will find me soon enough.
In the meantime, I'm doing the best I can.
Somedays, I come up short and others, well, like one of my favorite songs says:

On a good day, we can part the seas
And on a bad day, glory beyond our reach

Robert M. Rodriguez