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The First Time

I have a confession to make, and it may be shocking coming from a writer.  I’ve never used drugs.  I had a brother who did and some of what happened scared the shit out of me.  That, and my father was a professional alcoholic.

“The First Time,” recently published on Dali’s LoveChild, is based on a couple of reflections.  A while back a friend invited me to try hallucinogenic mushrooms, as a spiritual experience.  I politely refused, but wondered what would have happened if I had.

You see, growing up in an alcoholic family, you never know what is normal.  I thought the kinds of things involving guns and beer were typical.  You mean you don’t do this at your house?  I went to a bar for the first time before I was five.

But my concern is deeper.  I don’t know what reality is.  If I tried shrooms, would I become trapped in an alternate reality?  What if they never wore off?  Sometimes I’m just not very brave.



As with all of my writing, there is a metaphor at work here as well.  It revolves around the friend who lays dying.  Perceptions of reality can change in any number of ways.  Some involving ingestion, other involving the opposite.

Dali’s LoveChild is a website for dreams and nightmares.  I have my fair share of both.  In many respects waking reality is already a nightmare.  Shrooms might help, but with my family’s track record with controlled substances, I can’t get much beyond a beer.

The story is, of course, fiction.  But fiction participates in reality just as much as fact does.  Can we decide what we will experience as reality?  Can we sustain the illusion?


My friend swears shrooms are natural and benign.  Non-addictive.  But is reality non-addictive?  How can you want something too much and then be weary of it?  I don’t have the answers; that’s why I write.

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