7
SENIOR HIGH
The true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes . . .
MARCEL PROUST
If you happen to be of the older persuasion, do you remember the moment you crossed over? I know I do. I must have been in my early fifties and was about to get on a Manhattan cross-town bus. I dug into my pocket, took out my change (this was before MetroCards), and started depositing quarters into the machine. After dropping the first three in, the driver immediately stretched out his hand to cover the opening.
“No one’s going to question you!” he said.
Huh? Then I noticed the listed fares: Standard ride: $1.50. Seniors: $.75.
Wait! I thought. I want to be questioned! I want to be proofed on this end!
It’s taken me a while to adjust. Indeed, I’m still getting used to it. But then again, I’ve had a medicinal advantage.
YOUTH SERUM
When I roll, the world seems made new again. (Of course, that would be me that’s made new.) In this and other ways, MDMA has helped me adjust to and deal with aging and mortality. And it’s given me, up here in my early seventies, a new lease on youth. For a few hours, this worldweary mind and aging body are reinvigorated. As long as I use it wisely, I can take a brief vacation in Youthlandia and return to the fresh vitality of my thirty- or even twenty-year-old self for a few hours. I’m free and reborn with an innocent, fresh-off-the-boat feeling. And Shelley and I experience a unique attunement. We’re like two kids, hand in hand, skipping around our chemical playground.
Over the years, she and I and others in our community have turned responsible use of this recreational medicine into a science as well as an art form, transforming what could otherwise be a dangerous indulgence into a tool that continuously brings joy and vitality to our senior years.
This is my fountain of youth. It doesn’t last, of course; I do come down and have to pay an energy debt (mostly I just sleep it off and then rest the next day). But there’s nothing like once again experiencing in my bones the vitality I used to take for granted. I feel rejuvenated in a way that can echo for days. And over the course of years and dozens of rolls, this has had a cumulative effect. Further, remembering how good I can feel in every way helps infuse me with the kind of optimism that can tend to wane with age.
As Anaïs Nin said, “We don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are.” This medicine freshens my outlook and my inlook.
While I may therefore lament, as many of us do, that I didn’t know then all I know now, at least with MDMA I can still know now some of the youthful vitality I knew back then. To put it another way, the first time around, youth chose me. The second time, I make the choice. For Shelley and me, MDMA used properly is our youth serum. The Japanese have a word for this: kanreki, which means “second spring.”
Besides blessing me with a daylong vacation from aging, the medicine also helps me reconnect with my love for mankind. And these days, I don’t take this for granted. I view MDMA as an egalitarian opportunity for joy and rejuvenation, one whose availability is not limited to the wealthy, the spiritual, . . . or the young. No matter one’s class, age, gender, race, or sexuality, a person can take charge of their own chemistry and potentially their whole worldview as well. And after having spent a lifetime following mainstream advice about how to add years to my life, I’ve decided to spend my remaining time following my own advice about how to add life to my years.
THE OLD ISM
Recently a client of mine, voicing his frustration about living in the city, declared, “New York is a youth engine! It’s not for the old like me!” The fact that he feels old in New York at age thirty-seven says plenty. The fact that he said it to a therapist almost twice his age without the slightest hint of irony may say even more.
In another session recently, a good-looking man struggling with pulling the trigger on his divorce (his wife had repeatedly cheated on him) declared, “I doubt I’ll ever attract another good-looking woman at my age!” He’s thirty-two. And he lives in Manhattan, home of the largest concentration of single women in America.1 And he continues to hold on to this toxic relationship.
That’s when I realized that the impact of ageism falls not only on people like me, but all the way down the line. We’re all poisoned by this youth-centric lie, this psychological affliction that over time oppresses all who live past their midtwenties.
What have we signed onto? As we collect ourselves after being unceremoniously bumped off the fashion runway of age status at twenty-five or thirty, joining those who went before, we can collectively challenge this crap that’s crippled our self-esteem. And yes, we can take comfort that, especially in urban areas, every twenty-one-year-old who’s happily basking in their fifteen minutes of fame will be joining us soon enough. In time we all feel the pain, not of aging but of ageism. The “hill” got moved closer, and if you’re twenty-five, you’ll soon find yourself over it—or believing you are.
It’s as if we are supposed to somehow be ashamed for having allowed ourselves to grow older. At the same time, we’re taught to cherish what’s most fleeting and perishable about ourselves while ignoring the futility of it. And all the while dismissing that which is truly precious and appreciates with time. To say nothing of denying that aging is, in fact, an accomplishment!
When we use the word old to define others or ourselves, we are often confining and reducing ourselves to a predetermined set of diminishing expectations. These can hobble and limit us if we’re not aware of them.
A Harvard psychologist named Ellen Langer has done repeated studies placing older adults into environments for a week or two that would, like entering a time warp, remind them of their earlier days. They emerged happier and measurably healthier. According to Bruce Grierson’s article, “What If Age Is Nothing but a Mindset?” “they had been pulled out of mothballs and made to feel important again.”
The point? “That health and illness are much more rooted in our minds and in our hearts and how we experience ourselves in the world than our models even begin to understand.” And that, therefore, expectations we hold about how we’re supposed to feel and behave as we age have a great impact on our physical health and mental well-being.
The article goes on to say:
In one of [Langer’s] experiments, nursing-home residents who had exhibited early stages of memory loss were able to do better on memory tests when they were given incentives to remember—showing that in many cases, indifference was being mistaken for brain deterioration. In another, now considered a classic of social psychology, Langer gave houseplants to two groups of nursing-home residents. She told one group that they were responsible for keeping the plant alive and that they could also make choices about their schedules during the day. She told the other group that the staff would care for the plants, and they were not given any choice in their schedules. Eighteen months later, twice as many subjects in the plant-caring, decision-making group were still alive than in the control group.2
When we’re alert to ageism’s insidious messages, we’re empowered. For example, lately, when I am gratefully about to accept feedback such as, “You look good for your age,” I’ve begun to stop and think: Wait a minute! Am I really being flattered, or am I being given a backhanded compliment? Such a line acts like an insidious primer or cue subtly meant to keep us all in our place, instructing us to expect that we will decrease in attractiveness (and value!) as we get older. The words seem to imply that only youth looks good, and so I’m only good-looking when I don’t appear to be what I actually am!
I would suspect, moreover, that if I said, “You look good for a _________,” to a member of any other demographic in America, they might not feel the flattery in it either.
What would happen if, the next time someone guesses my age to be younger than it is, I reacted indignantly? “Excuse me! Do I really look sixty? I’m seventy-years-old, thank you very much!” In a culture where the words old and older are used as pejoratives, maybe such a response can start shaking things up.
I was inspired recently when I watched an episode of the brave and wonderful Netflix show Grace and Frankie. The two main characters Grace (Jane Fonda) and Frankie (Lily Tomlin) were tempted to make a lot of money selling their line of vibrators for older women by partnering with a marketing company. But when they saw the image the company wanted to place on the package—of the two of them airbrushed to appear twenty or thirty years younger—they walked. They knew the real message was, old is ugly; only youth is appealing.
And when I hear that admonishing voice in my head saying Act your age! I know now that at times I should listen, and at other times I should maybe act exactly as I please.
God knows MDMA isn’t the only way to counter this crap, but I’ve found it to be a tool that can help a person reject it.
What I’ve discovered is that this chemical helicopter ride I’ve been talking about gives me a periodic perspective on where I’ve been and where I’m headed. Further, I’ve found ordinary states of consciousness can be downright dangerous. And this may especially hold true for those of us who are aging—and who isn’t? When I’m either grappling with the depressive, deer-in-the-headlights trance of self-devaluation I’ve inadvertently wallpapered my internal homepage with or the haunting sense I’m depreciating like a stock that keeps going down the longer it’s around, just how can constantly remaining in an ordinary state of consciousness serve me, especially when something like MDMA can so readily shake me free of it?
What Shelley and I have discovered is that the very experience of rolling begins to deconstruct ageism. It starts with confronting the inner critic that sneers, Aren’t you a little old for this? I talk back to him and say, I’m supposed to quash my life force to fit your, or anybody else’s, image of what’s age appropriate? To take your judgments to heart and all the way to the grave? If I’m too old for anything, it’s that! Too old to entertain lies that leach off my aliveness. One compensation for shed hair and muscle tone can be shedding one’s concerns about what others might think.
Aging and psychedelics have both been stigmatized in our culture. Perhaps it’s time to be open about, and unashamed of, both.
HOLISTIC AGING
One good roll can help me retain and embody a bit of every age I’ve ever been. I call this holistic aging.
In this view, any age or chapter in one’s life is no less valid than any other. My inner preverbal infant and my inner eight-year-old may have valuable information and perspectives for me up here at seventy. The eighteen-year-old and fifty-year-old each exist within me with a voice and point of view that can benefit me now. They are all accessible and have information to convey if I but let them speak.
MDMA helps spark these connections by cultivating my youthful essence while utilizing the advantages of aging. It does this by revitalizing my weary flesh and bones while I’m bringing my years of accumulated knowledge and lived life to the experience. For example, while rolling, I can act from the urge to open up to another person while accessing all I’ve learned over time about how to effectively do so.
With holistic aging, at every age now, I am every age. My very definition of self expands and becomes more flexible. I contain multitudes of perspectives that increase my chances of making every piece of my past potentially useful. My lifespan to this point is now expanded; my experiences optimized.
Part of growing old is missing one’s youth. But my inner youth isn’t as far away as I thought. In fact, it—he—lies right beneath my skin. And, in fact, we can talk.
To this end, I began envisioning a dialogue between my inner nineteen-year-old and me now, at seventy. The inner-nineteen-year-old me would still be living as a hippie back in 1970; the older me exists here in the present. What would happen, I wondered, if I ever let the two of them encounter each other for the first time and have a real talk? It would probably go something like this:
NINETEEN (upon seeing his older self): Yikes! What happened to you? Are you dying or something?
SEVENTY: Very funny.
NINETEEN (staring at seventy’s wrinkled face): But really—how could you let this happen?
SEVENTY: Hey—consider the alternative. And can’t you do something about your hair?
NINETEEN: Can’t you do something about your hair?
SEVENTY: I don’t have any hair!
NINETEEN: No kidding! So maybe you can just say I’m compensating for you beforehand. And tell me, did you completely sell out? Should I off myself now? You cut your hair, went straight. Somebody can look at you now and never guess where you came from!
SEVENTY: That’s how I need to be in this world.
NINETEEN: You embarrass me! I’d never want to be seen with you! My friends would all laugh!
SEVENTY: I’m too old to care.
NINETEEN: Yeah, but you need me now!
SEVENTY: No—you need me! To get you out of your adolescent muck!
NINETEEN: There you go, talking like Dad.
SEVENTY: You shoulda listened to him!
NINETEEN: Yeah, right. I’ll say it again: You need me!
SEVENTY: For what? Although I could use the stamina you’ve got, that’s for sure! Oh, the things I could teach you now about pleasing a woman!
NINETEEN: I do very well, thank you very much. What I may lack in experience I make up for within ten minutes of finishing.
SEVENTY: (sighs) Ah, yes . . . stamina as nostalgia.
NINETEEN: But you need me for other reasons . . . like to remind you. (Singing as he prances around): I could be handy, mending a fuse, when your light is gone!
SEVENTY: Hey, I remember the Beatles, but I’m past sixty-four now.
NINETEEN: But I could remind you of what it was like being my age.
SEVENTY: So I can get all depressed?
Nineteen: I’m part of you, man. I’m right here! But you forget I exist. Please—it’s a beautiful day. Can we at least go out for a walk in the park or something?
SEVENTY: When I get a minute.
NINETEEN: You mean—you don’t have a minute? So you have these nice calmer seas now, but no time to sail them?
SEVENTY: Look. I’m in the thick of my life. I’ve bitten off a lot, and I’m busy chewing—my job, my writing, my marriage, my men’s team and friends, and I’m online a lot . . .
NINETEEN: Waiting on a line?
SEVENTY: It’s a long story.
NINETEEN: Can we just go out and enjoy the day?
SEVENTY: I’ve got work to do, and then I need to get some sleep.
NINETEEN: You’re old and slow and scary, and I’m stuck inside of you!
SEVENTY: Pipe down!
NINETEEN: HELP—somebody! I’m trapped inside this dying mammoth!
SEVENTY: Imagine how I feel.
NINETEEN: But wait—don’t you have any grass lying around?
SEVENTY (smiling): You mean wheat grass?
NINETEEN: Come on! Any acid?
SEVENTY: You mean ascorbic?
NINETEEN: Oh God! Make that a dead mammoth! C’mon man! You don’t have much time. In a few years, you won’t be able to do the things I still want to do!
SEVENTY: Like . . . ?
NINETEEN: Like playing ball, then going to the beach . . . in the Bahamas! Or let’s just play all night in the city! Have one too many! Have an adventure! Boogie!
SEVENTY: Right now I’m getting exhausted just listening to you!
How I resolve the tension between these two parts of me will help inform how well I age. Because I’m learning that, within one’s being as well as out in the world, the young can energize the old, just as the old can educate the young. One offers exuberance, the other, experience. And there can be a similar interaction with MDMA when one is over thirty-five: one brings the fullness of their being, all they’ve become, to inform the encounter, while in turn being renewed and reminded by the medicine about just how fresh, vital, and alive one can still feel.
Last New Year’s Eve, rolling into the new year, Shelley noted the innocence in my face. Her acknowledgment really touched me. Even though such a thing may be easy to scoff at and ridicule, she reminded me in that moment of my essence. Lord knows I have enough life experience to be wary and alert, nuanced and polished in my responses to my environment. But what I thought long ago to be the gleam of youth in my eye turned out all these years later to be the gleam of life itself. A precious piece of me has always been, and remains, pure. This innocence gets expressed at times as generosity, flexibility in my responses, childlike playfulness, or simply giving my love away. And it is in this way that my inner newborn or young boy can inform me now. As Timothy Leary said, “You’re only as young as the last time you changed your mind.”
I love to express my spirit. I live to give, but also, I give to live, because whenever I’ve allowed that hose between me and others to get twisted, I’ve shriveled and dried up. How many of us suffer from our generous spirit or our innocence being forgotten or rejected? How much of the world?
Holistic aging can also include accessing and integrating not just all that’s occurred till now, but the entire lifespan as well. That portion of my time here yet to be lived is still part of the fabric, part of the whole story of my life. What would it be like to jump ahead and read selections from a later chapter?
Here’s a joke about two old coots at the general store up in Maine:
COOT NUMBER ONE: Hey farmer, you live here all your life?
COOT NUMBER TWO: Not yet I ain’t.
They once surveyed seniors (in a nursing home, I believe) asking them about their regrets in life. They discovered that what old people regret the most are the things they didn’t do. I have allowed this data to inform some of my choices.
But more of this kind of information may currently reside inside me, so from time to time I may engage my intuition or imagination to access an older—say, eighty-five-year-old—version of me. What would he have to say to me? What advice might he impart that I would do well to heed? I might not consciously know what he has to say to me until I actively engage him, much like I have done with my inner nineteen-year-old, as shown on the previous pages.
I imagine he might counsel me thusly:
EIGHT-FIVE: “Wo! Hold on there, cowboy! Pull up on those reins at bit, will ya? Not only are you galloping your way toward me, but you’re racing through rich terrain that’s too rigorous for me to ever visit again. You’re speeding toward the climax while missing the movie! There’s so much there for you right where you are. Plus you have the capacity to savor and appreciate so much more than you could just a few years ago. I’m warning you: you can push yourself through these days, but you ain’t getting them back!”
Accordingly, every few months or so, I allow MDMA to help me sit a spell and inhale deep into my here and now. I get to slow that horse down. It helps me discover where I am by pausing long enough to locate my coordinates.
I’d like to age holistically, savoring my entire existence fully and all at once: Pointing to the stars while I’m grounded in the past. Splashed all over the tube claiming my fifteen minutes of fame and lying on the couch watching Cagney, Astaire, and Clooney. Pushing my face into the wind to meet new and scary challenges and bathing in the safe and soothing past. Riding into the city to make it mine at last while disappearing into a Kauai forest to take my final rest.
While I’m forging new paths of knowing and ways of being, I want to also remember that my body is a living library, with tomes of forgotten times always ready for the borrowing. I can strive to make a better world just as I revel in the richness of my personal and our cultural heritage. Standing in the midst of this, I can make a coherent story of my life and derive meaning from my existence.
I also try to keep in mind one of those emails going around years ago among boomers, written by a couple well into their eighties. Its message went something like, “Do it now before it’s too late because soon it will be!” They were pointing out how it really was too late for them to do so many things and were like two wise elders counseling anyone who would listen.
Finally, there’s author Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan, who spoke of cultivating a relationship with your own mortality. He suggested keeping it, as an advisor, over your shoulder.
I grew up hating and fearing death, because it took my mom from me when I was a teenager and just waking up. But I ignore it at my own peril. And maybe placing it (or, as I imagine, him) on my inner board of advisors, alongside younger versions of myself, can help keep me informed of the full range of available possibilities.
Should I take a crazy chance? Break the rules? Prudence counsels no. But my mortality might say, “You don’t know when I’ll be intruding, and then it will all be over. You might want to consider taking this risk, to possibly succeed and benefit. Or to fail and learn from it. Or perhaps only to feel more alive while you still are.”
He seems to want to wake me to life’s full spectrum of perspectives: to not only live like there’s no tomorrow but to also realize I’ve had many tomorrows so far and so to plan for what might be quite a few more. I therefore might consider living large and partying while I still can but also getting very still at times, so that I can be fully here and fully arrive in the moment while there’s still one to be had.
MDMA helps me do both. I can use it to get high and celebrate my continuing existence and also to slow down and take my time before it’s taken from me. It helps me savor each delicious breath as I draw it so warmly into my chest. This way of quietly living it up helps me reconcile the fact that one day I’m going down. Being so alive, and so often, gives me less to regret when that time comes. And it decreases my need to be on a constant, frantic, and futile quest to quell that gnawing certainty.
If I listen even closer to this dark ally, he also is counseling me to periodically ask myself: If I ended today, what inside me would remain unsaid? Who do I love who would never know it? What have I got that would never be given? What part of me would not be all used up? And finally, How can I live loud enough or deep enough so that my life will still reverberate after I’m gone?
So while it does spook me, if my death means to frighten me at all, it’s to scare me to life.
It is the younger, less mature man in me who wants light without shadow, up without down, and good without bad, even though it’s the bad that makes the good look good, and the down that makes the up feel good. Likewise, nothing can make me feel alive quite like the prospect of death.
And death itself? Perhaps when I identify—and identify with—what’s eternal in me (not my body or my personality) and therefore indestructible, I’ll be less afraid of him. Indeed, is there anything to be afraid of, really? Facing my fear of death might be my greatest source of strength.
BETTER OVER THE HILL THAN UNDER IT
There are two boxes in this world one needs to avoid as best one can: the box they put you in when you die, and the one they try to put you in when you’re alive. I found that the best way to delay the former is to live a life outside the latter.
In other words, if you’ll indulge me a moment: If your question is longevital, your answer may be chemical!
I’ve heard MDMA and psychedelics referred to as “existential medicine,” and I believe I know why. It’s a choice one makes out of a feeling of responsibility for one’s own well-being. It’s a gut-level belief that, at least for many of those privileged to be living in a first world country like ours at a time like this, the quality of one’s only life is up for grabs.
For me, just knowing that MDMA is available as part of my experiential repertoire—that such an experience is even possible—reassures me that I am privy to one of life’s more uncanny options. I feel, actually, like I’m getting away with something: You mean, I can feel this good? Is that even allowed, without a bigger downside or punishment? For me, it makes life even more worth living.
Besides, you’re only young twice (if you want to be).
Which brings me to the concept of maturity. Sometimes I choose to act responsibly by working hard at taking care of my clients, my wife, and my friends and men’s team. And by buckling down and sacrificing today’s pleasure for the sake of future benefits or generations. And sometimes I choose to act responsibly by living as if the one whose business it is to make the most of my life is me. This translates into doing, sans hurting others, whatever inspires me. I likewise presume that living according to other people’s expectations is not a sign of maturity but of conformity or resignation or both. For many it seems to equate with never again risking looking foolish, as if being mature means acting in ways that merely appear dignified.
The very notion that one should “age gracefully” can be a subtly constraining admonition. Shelley and I are not aging gracefully, but greatly, counterintuitively, and joyfully.
Besides, in the greater scheme of things, we are all of us in this world so utterly, ridiculously insignificant. And this heavy head of mine, that thinks its thoughts and insights are so important, will soon be gone and forgotten. Or, as Shelley likes to remind me, “A hundred years from now, all new people.”
So, the only thing that really matters, as far as I can tell, and if anything matters at all, is to be skillfully kind to others in this particular moment and to create interactions and expressions that touch and hopefully serve others.
But there’s also something else at play with aging and time: Once you’re “over the hill,” the speed going down increases. Time changes velocity, like different sections of a river. In your teens, a year is only 1/15 or 1/18 of your life. It can feel slow as you drift along. In your twenties and thirties, it begins to speed up and it rushes you along a bit quicker.
At fifty, a year becomes a small fraction, 1/50 of your life, and soon you’re shooting the rapids. The years blip by, and your visage starts to startle you. You begin to suspect if you don’t grab what you can from the shore as you whiz by, you’ll miss out forever, and then you’ll be long gone and soon forgotten.
One day soon, possibly one day very soon, it may be too unhealthy for me to do certain things, or I may be too stuck in my ways to try. So increasingly, time is looking like something I should seize.
Occasionally I grieve for the time—and for all—that’s been lost. Yet doing a medicine like MDMA has for me been an act of personal restoration, a reclaiming of what I once had and who I once was that nevertheless remains my birthright: To know joy, exuberance, and naked-as-a-baby wonder, to say nothing of great fun and, at times, a life-altering transcendence. To be reminded of this every now and again is all I really need. Then I can rejoin the battle that is my life with a refreshed sense of optimism, purpose, and even a bit of spiritual might.
Besides, as my rolls have forever widened my spectrum of lived experience and deepened my well of corporal pleasures, they add to my surety, as my life options decrease, that I’ve fully lived.
I smile when I realize that I’m starting to feel more entitled—to speak with confidence and authority, to assert myself and ask for what I want, to walk into a room full of people and indulge my desire for mischief or attention. I’ve earned the right to do things my way and to not care so terribly much if someone doesn’t like it. And frankly, I’m tired of pretending I’m not everything I am—hence this book! When I die, I understand I’ll be dead for a quite a while. Just how fully, and boldly, would I like to live out my remaining moments?
COMING ATTRACTIONS
Which brings me to orgasm. (Wait, that didn’t come out quite right.)
I like to think of it as that God-given lift of aliveness at the end of the act, like the sun climaxing with the clouds at the close of day. All my thoughts disappear (which for me is saying something), all my senses are heightened, and the experience of “I” flips to “us.” Where did I go? No wonder the French call it “the little death.”
Orgasm also has another benefit: losing control. During these localized eruptions of the cosmic volcano, I finally can remove the mask and drop the armor. For one who keeps it all together (and packed pretty tight) sex is one of my favorite ways of letting it all go. It’s right up there with dancing and emotional catharsis, though good sex is akin to both of these.
Sometimes with Shelley, as the bedroom fills with happy noises while we free fall into hot oblivion, I feel a connection to all the women I’ve ever been with. Pulled by sense memories that connect the climactic dots back through time to all I’ve shared this passion with.
I’ve also learned what I didn’t know as a teenage boy, when I thought orgasm was something limited to the tip of my cock. I later discovered to my delight that this was a silly myth. Learning that I could greatly expand the area of pleasure was a revelation to me. And as with rolling, after experiencing something like that, it was hard to think of my body, or look at life, quite the same way again. Like, what else is possible?
Well for one thing, as it turns out, it’s possible that sex in my seventies can be even better than it was as a twentysomething! The younger man inside me shakes his head in disbelief. Whoever knew one could age hedonistically?
A highlight of our third time at PEX was when Shelley and I presented our workshop, Party, Play, and Pleasure across the Lifespan. We preached our gospel to a crowd that ranged in age from twenty to seventy, presenting a distillation of our sixteen years of experience as a couple of elders in this, our community. The message? If you stay aware of the ageist messages that can subvert your joy, and you moderate your substance use over time, medicines like MDMA—which bolsters the libido of the heart—can continue to serve as a fountain of youth as you enter and navigate middle age and beyond.
Shelley, who at PEX blossomed like a sunflower in that Garden of Freedom, spoke about sex, mostly to the women. She testified that she, in her late sixties, is more erotically alive now than at any time in her life, thanks to a skillful use of cannabis and some self-exploration. Sharing information about the G-spot, along with her story—that she didn’t find true love until age forty-nine—served as an inspiration to the younger women, who thanked her afterward.
LOST AND FOUND
I’m not the first to note that the physical diminishment that comes with the withering winds of age is often made up for by an increased capacity to savor experiences like literature, travel, art, and other sensualities. Our depth of appreciation can increase as our body’s abilities decrease. These changes represent the ironies but also the compensations of the aging process. We can gain access to a greater range of enlivening and enriching experiences as we ripen and grow sweeter, even as we are soon about to drop from the vine.
To Shelley and me, aging at first appeared to be a matter of helplessly watching ships of experiential opportunity sail away. That, however, turned out not to be the case. What we found was that the old paradigm of aging, as a time of inexorable slow demise and little else, was itself aging out. We discovered we could use our stability and maturity, the confidence we’d built, and the ability to identify and appreciate the best things in life to build a platform upon which we could reclaim the adventurous and playful impulses of youth, only now minus the recklessness.
While at PEX one year, surrounded by all those young and nubile bodies dancing by the pool and recalling that dialogue between my inner younger and older selves I’d written about, I texted my boomer and tribe-member friend Rich Orloff back in New York. He knew I was at PEX.
Help! I’m a twenty-five-year-old man trapped in a sixty-five-year-old body!
Be both, he replied.
Indeed, at PEX and other such parties, I can be my fully aged and ripened self—respected, and probably more capable of appreciating the astonishingly beautiful bodies all around me than these sweaty, well-endowed kids are. And this while also regarding the crowd (especially the women) through twenty-five-year-old eyes. I can be both. And they, poor dears, cannot.
I liken the wonder that can accompany the ascent of age to the mystical innocence I knew as a child. It’s that same twinkle in crow’s-feet eyes. Just like when I was a young boy, I have this sense of newness, a feeling of I’ve never been here before. And I can shed the baggage and all the accoutrements I took on in adulthood and get back to the essentials of discovery, whimsy, and joy. And that old young innocence can refresh my eyes and smooth out some of the wrinkles in this convoluted noggin.
This is where MDMA can serve as a mental as well as emotional decongestant. There’s enough at this stage of life that one needs to face in terms of health, finances, and closing windows of all sorts. To now have the option of a new window opening to a world of fresh possibility and self-discovery sounds pretty useful to me! Besides, I’ve found that my ability to appreciate and benefit from medicines like MDMA ripens with age.
And as I see it, as one’s quantity of life is fading, it behooves one to take charge of his or her quality of life and all the available opportunities to increase it. And I find that my quality of life can sometimes feel skewed in one direction or another. Life in the fifties or sixties can at times feel like an uphill climb: grueling, stressful, laborious. Stairs get steeper; stress can strap or strike me down. Shelley and I have found that we can be striding along and—just like that—lose our footing for a moment (perhaps literally), and our quality of life can take a dive for a week, month, or longer.
On the other hand, life at this stage can also feel like a deeply satisfying deepening, involving periodically descending into mines of memory and emerging with gems of meaning. And sometimes it can entail turning around to see just how far I have climbed, proud of the striking view that I’ve gained. There are moments I even feel like I’m slicking down a waterslide and splashing into a pool of rewards simply by virtue of having made it to this point with my eyes open.
But, to tell the whole truth, the problem with getting older is that, along with the arteries, all the clay tends to harden. Oh, it gets easier to relish what I have but harder to change it and easier to enjoy cozy comforts that were invited into my life as guests but soon became the hosts and then the masters.
Even taking into account my use of MDMA, there are some adventures that have been replaced with safety, some freedoms replaced with commitment, and some experimentation in new possibilities replaced with order and predictability.
What I’ve gained or given up as a result of the dictates of aging (especially when I’m not rolling) and the choices I’ve made looks something like this:
| Found | Lost | |
| Wholesomeness | Pungence | |
| Equanimity | Wildness | |
| Fulfillment | The fertile void | |
| Serenity | Excitement | |
| Wisdom | Innocence |
As I’ve climbed the mountain, though I’ve recently felt weary at times, the view has afforded me some well-earned scenery, the perspective of pinnacles, the sighting of heretofore unseen connections (Oh, look at that! The times I’ve been most satisfied have been the times I’ve been of most use!), the hues of experience decorating the landscape like so many luminous clouds at sunset.
And I notice I have begun to warm to this strange new and serene terrain. There’s a slow shock of peace, the hum and purr of calm where there’d once been the constant static of testosterone. And, like back in my hippie days, I can once again relate to time as a lazy friend that just wants to hang out.
It occurs to me that aging can rule like a benevolent dictator over my life. As Joni Mitchell says, “Well something’s lost, but something’s gained, in living every day.”
Ah, so at this rate, in a while I’ll be a blithering idiot but an enlightened one!
Yet during this entire uninvited process, I’ve learned that, if I can, from time to time, but open my mind the few seconds it takes to allow some daring new information to enter, my whole life can still open along with it. And even if it’s too late to discover the equivalent of a new color or continent, I can nevertheless help and inspire others to do so.
It’s astonishing to me that, as I age, I feel ever more alive. As I grow greyer, in some ways I’m still growing stronger. As my physical limitations increase, I’m having more fun than ever! And as old friends have given up, died off, or have moved away, I’ve found a whole vital community to belong to and hang out with.
THE BUCKET LIST AND THE OTHER ONE
One’s “bucket list” can begin with all those things one doesn’t have to do anymore. All the ways you don’t have to behave or live up to other people’s expectations and the things you don’t have to be concerned about.
And sometimes, when being prudent and reasonable means holding off until it may be too late, a bucket list can evolve into a fuck-it list. For Shelley and me, when our most-important-things-to-do list starts to grow fat from procrastination, we often feel the need to lose the “wait.” For example, we could be patient until it’s financially more prudent to do some large-scale traveling, but then it could become too late to fully enjoy it. Years from now, what will matter most is having done it while we still could. My father had another way of putting it: “The man who dies with a fortune in the bank is a fool!”
DANCING WITH THE KIDS
After a recent underground party Shelley and I attended, I was struck by what occurred.
We kept up with them that night! And my body, sparked by this wondrous substance, was doing new things, pounding deep pelvic emphatica onto that dance floor! I felt like I had just graduated from dancing-to-look-good, to moving-to-feel-good! And Shelley as well, on little more than a lime rickey and some puffs on the vaporizer, was dancing up a storm!
My corporal chemistry was a pulsating metaphor for aging, resurrection, and a kind of existential redemption: my answer to slowly fading away, my way of raging at the slow dying of the light—this defiant, disruptive, night- and years-long second wind. And it all happens to be one hell of a good ride!
When we arrived it almost felt like we were crashing the place, as we seemed to be the oldest there by like eighty years. But at one point I was dancing by myself, and one girl who was dancing with her friends turned a bit to include me in their circle, and then others started joining them. Soon there was one of those large circles that can form on dance floors, where one person at a time jumps into the middle to strut their stuff while the others (hopefully) cheer them on. Some hotshots did just that, and did it well, rejoining the circle when they were done. And then a gorgeous young lady beckoned me to the center, and so I boogied for them, and then she joined me, and the two of us wildly cut loose.
Yes, we kept up with them. And in so doing, Shelley and I served as a possibility for them as well. Maybe that’s why the dudes were fist-bumping me when we left. (The party was still going on, but by 3:00 a.m. we’d had enough.)
Later, before hitting the sack at just before dawn, I pictured myself back on that dance floor, hovering over it like an ageless, maniacal spirit, blessing and exhorting the others to join a rebellion against death at an early age or at all.
ARE DRUGS WASTED ON THE YOUNG . . . AND THE WASTED?
Are drugs wasted on the young? Often. I’m reminded of how, when we were young, many of my friends and I were like children playing with fire. Some of us saw the light; some got burned. Just like young folks now.
From what I’ve observed, some of them know how to use substances wisely, and many, perhaps most, do not—at least not yet. The ancient Jewish mystical teachings of Kabbalah traditionally require aspirants to first reach forty years of age. Sometimes I wish I had had to wait that long. Doing acid, for example, in my twenties and thirties, subjected my fragile ego to episodes of temporary dissolution at a time I needed to nurture and develop it. It really had more to tell me than I could hear, or make use of, at the time. So, until I reached my forties, LSD was mostly wasted on me (save for some cosmic sex).
Many young people who use substances like MDMA screw around with it and abuse it, not respecting its power until perhaps they get hurt, and then they swear off it for life. The true potential of this drug is therefore wasted on them. In this way and all too often, young people give good drugs a bad name.
And, I’m sorry to say, this started with my generation.
The best definition of luck I ever heard is, “where preparation meets opportunity.” Often there’s little “luck,” because there’s little preparation for something like MDMA or LSD when one is only fourteen, sixteen, eighteen, or even twenty years of age. But if one spends their time preparing, which in this context means growing one’s mind, facing one’s demons, and doing one’s homework in life’s university and then meets such a chemical opportunity, one can get very lucky indeed. Those Silicon Valley billionaires didn’t just drop acid one day and suddenly dream up their apps and inventions. The internet and computers were already there, and they were already steeped in one or the other. Then they tripped, and the inspiration that ensued helped them make history.
KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY
My youngest nephew, Daniel, is no ordinary young man. He eschews technology and to this day at age thirty-one goes without a smartphone (imagine!). Through his early teens he spent summers at a camp founded by a Native American, where the campers lived in teepees, learned survival skills, went without any electricity, and pumped their own water every morning. He always preferred to call me Charley, instead of Uncle Charley, as that would assign us prescribed roles. Get the picture?
Me, I never had children and always tended to feel uncomfortable around them. In their presence I would suddenly be transported back to my own childhood and feel an old awkward shyness. With my nephews, I always wanted to find a way in there so I could have a decent relationship with them.
Once, when they were seventeen, fourteen, and eight, my brother roped me into taking care of them for a week while he and his wife at the time celebrated their tenth anniversary down in New Orleans. I set about it methodically, trying to hone the process down to a finely tuned to-do list. Besides having a crash course in what it’s like to be a parent (“Oh I get it!” I said to a friend halfway through. “For this week, I don’t have a life!”), I recall one point where Lonnie, the fourteen-year-old, looked at me across the living room floor and said, “Uncle Charley! Don’t you want to talk to us?” Truth is, I didn’t know how.
In 2008 when Daniel was nineteen and taking a year off before heading to college, he went down to the Yucatán province in Mexico to work on an organic farm and afterward checked out the annual Rainbow Gathering down there. This is the great-granddaddy to Burning Man, dating from 1972 and attended by hippies, both old and wannabe.
Upon his return, I was interested in hearing about it. As he described his time at the gathering, I heard the faint sounds of an opening between us when he seemed to be circumspect about an experience he had there.
“Sounds like there was some experimentation going on with entheogens,” I said. When I uttered that last word, you could almost hear the cracking of the code that divides the generations. Entheogen, meaning “God realizing” or “generating the divine within,” is sometimes used instead of the more common psychedelic and is a word that would most always be spoken by the initiated. Dan then felt comfortable enough to open up about his first experience, which was with LSD. This became our way to begin connecting and relating as adults, and we’ve been closer ever since.
TRIPPING FOR THE TRIBE
Maybe what is motivating some of the more serious young people who experiment with substances like MDMA, from deep inside their bones, is the age-old evolutionary urge to be of use to the tribe. By venturing into the woods or the psychic void they embark on a kind of vision quest, so as to, in the words of Three Dog Night, “take back something worth remembering.” One might do this to serve as a kind of consciousness ambassador to his or her family, community, and planet. To what end? In Hebrew it’s called tikkun olam, meaning “to heal, repair, and transform the world.” What better purpose can a person serve at any age?
If this wasn’t their motivation for trying drugs at the start, an experience with a substance like MDMA can inspire one to turn what may have just been a lark into just such an aspiration. It can be used as part of what author and mythologist Joseph Campbell called the hero’s journey: the transformative trek from whom we thought we were to what we can become when we take brave and intelligent risks. He also, of course, said something about “following your bliss.”
ALL THE OLD DUDES CARRY THE NEWS
Our youthenized culture started in earnest with us boomers, along with those who marketed to us. We warned ourselves not to trust anyone over thirty and in the process demonized aging itself. It was the Who’s Pete Townsend singing, “I hope I die before I get old.”
Consequently, it’s no wonder that when we arrived here ourselves (those of us who did), our old biases came back to bite us in the butt. This has left many of us suffering from our own expectations of what it must mean to get old. We live in danger of predeceasing ourselves, dying in our minds before our time. As I’ve noted, research has shown that seniors who expect to become frail and slow down tend to do so more than those who don’t.
I therefore have wanted, out of my love of MDMA, to spread the word, especially to members of my generation. (Remember the scene in Cocoon where Don Ameche, Jack Gilford, and Maureen Stapleton dive into the swimming pool where the cocoons are, and how they suddenly felt? That’s how it feels!) I sometimes want to grab my old brothers and sisters and let them know our best days are both behind and right in front of us. And that it’s never too late to have a new beginning, and there’s no new beginning like reopening a treasure chest that one buried long ago.
Indeed, boomers I know who’ve returned to the responsible use of psychedelics after a long hiatus liken it to sitting down to enjoy a special dish for the first time in decades. They report an enhanced ability to appreciate what is laid before them. Or it can be like revisiting a novel one enjoyed in one’s youth; it can read like a whole new book.
We may also tend to use these substances more responsibly now, as a means of growth and self-actualization rather than an end in itself. Indeed, lower doses of MDMA or other psychedelics are often quite sufficient for us anyway, as we become more sensitive to drugs as we age.
MDMA can reawaken the ideals—and us along with them—that went into deep freeze long ago and in so many of us still alive. With this molecule, we can once again feel glorious and recall that universal impulse of love some of us once proclaimed so exuberantly to the world. Our old counterculture credo of “peace and love,” which has curdled into a cliché, was like a cure not yet ready for clinical trials. But the symbiotic plagues of suspicion, hate, and terror have, in the course of our lifetime, become epidemics that threaten us all. It’s time for some new research.
Aside from these (shall I say) higher ideals of mine, I’m still a child at heart who wants friends to play with, and I’d really rather play with people my own age. And the fact that they’re no longer interested (save for a few very precious exceptions) just makes me sad. Here I am all giddy with glee at having found this great playground, and when it comes to my cohort, I’m practically alone. I get high, and sometimes it’s lonely up there. And of course, you can’t persuade people to do certain drugs any more than you can change their political leanings . . . especially anyone near my age!
But putting MDMA aside, the circle we might have once sat in on the dormitory floor or around the old campfire can now be a place we take as part of a circle of elders. Because whether younger folks realize it or not, they need us. Maybe we can’t distinguish a tweet from tiddlywinks, but we remember when all reality was, well, real (instead of mostly virtual), and when the screen that we could see the world through was in our window frame. We’ve got more to contribute than we may know.
Therefore, the best thing we boomers who were hippies and radicals can do now is realize we threw the baby (our best ideas, idealism, and audacity) out with the bathwater (our untamed rage, our recklessness, and ideological lunacy). But we were right more than we were wrong, and now it’s time to salvage the best of what we were able to offer: an egalitarian, humanitarian, and freedom-oriented worldview along with values of ecological sanity and economic fairness. And yes, also “better living through chemistry!”
We need to reclaim our legacy, which I believe is worth a social and spiritual fortune to successive generations. Our experience is priceless and our memories, precious; they are buried treasure as well as pleasure. I believe there is much down there in the back of that gold mine, faded from forgetting, that would, should we sojourn there, sparkle in the light of our miner’s hats. And, in turn, re-enlighten us.
So then, before we get out of the way, we “perennials” can gift the younger generations with our gems of wisdom to help them finish the job we started. Yes, all the old dudes—and the women too—still carry the news. And my advice to Gens X, Y, Z and Millennials? Don’t let us die till you pick our brains dry!
HEDGING MY BETS
MDMA for me is a chemical hedge against feeling like aging’s victim. I feel the need to mess with my body’s chemistry—at times, and carefully—because my body’s chemistry sure is messing with me! As we age, the body releases a continuous cocktail of chemicals that makes our hair turn thin and gray and fall to its death, wrinkles our skin, untones our muscles, and dulls our brains. And here we have not an antidote but a salve, a tonic, a rejuvenating vacation that can replenish the fountain of one’s youth.
MDMA can also serve as a chemical hedge for me against age-related fear. As we age, many of us become more concerned about our health and increasing fragility, and rightly so. Take, for example, me. I’m a veritable fearophiliac. I can get spooked by my own shadow!
So imagine my experience recently when I visited an ears, nose, and throat specialist to check out an unexplained symptom I was having, some weirdness when I swallowed. You could almost smell my fear.
And he did.
He asked a bunch of questions, then took one look in my mouth. His eyes widened, and I swear I could hear a ka-ching! sound.
“Oh, that’s gotta come out!”
He was referring to a small bump on my tongue, which was not what I was there for.
“Oh, I’m not saying it’s anything,” he hedged. “But,” he continued, invoking the surgeon’s bluntest sales tool, his voice dipping half an octave, “you never know.”
After he explained my swallowing symptoms were a simple case of acid reflux, he kept pressing his point. Fortunately for me, I’d been to an oral surgeon for the same bump some twenty years before (it was the same size then as it is now), concerned as I’ve always been that anything like this must be a cancerous tumor about to kill me for sure.
“Oh, it could be that,” the surgeon had said with a laugh. “But you have about the same chance of winning the lottery.” (Ironically enough, the New York Lottery’s advertising tag line is, “Hey, you never know.”) Ever since, when I’ve bought a losing lottery ticket, I’ve been a little relieved.
There are so many things the fear-industrial complex has me by the nose about. I therefore need to periodically balance out my personal chemistry with a medicine that in effect says, Actually, bro, you’re fine and will probably continue to be if you take normal precautions in life. So relax and enjoy the ride.
DESCENDING
While I thought I could use MDMA to avoid or delay physically aging, I had a rude awakening when I entered a recent group roll with a sore throat and exited with the onset of a bout of bronchitis. It seems one thing that erodes as one ages is one’s immunity. When these kids get high, they are, in part, really getting off on their youth without even knowing it. Damn them!
And finally there’s the matter of, as they used to say back in the day, “Whatever goes up, must come down.” When the ever-mortal high starts bending toward its long slow decline, I’m lowered back to that place the gurus, referring to what you return to after achieving enlightenment, call “just this.” I can explore and push the hell out of that envelope, but I inevitably return to just this seventy-year-old body, now tired as hell, and realize that I can’t, or at least shouldn’t, do this again for at least another six to eight weeks. Plus there’s the hard work of figuring out how on earth to use the experience to improve my life, lest I just chalk it up as a brief vacation from reality.
MDMA can shoot a flare over my mundane existence and show me where I am and where I may wish to head, but afterward it’s always back to mundanity I go. The medicine can make my life better, but it can also make my sober existence feel a bit more, well, sober than it did before. If I took MDMA to escape my life or make me happy, I would soon feel the dumb futility of it. And my body would, for the next day or two, convey very clearly (though not rudely) just how old it truly was.
What do you do when you know your body’s old, but you still feel young at heart? When you can use MDMA to realign the two, but only temporarily? I’ve found a certain way to approach aging that, whether I like it or not, rather than pointing back to revive my youthful spirit and abilities, points me downward, to where I’m standing right now. It entails feeling all my body’s heaviness and the relentless pull of gravity as if it were in eternity’s employ. It’s here, in those brief moments, when I can observe without flinching, my growing weariness, when I can almost feel the grains of sand being pulled down through the glass, that something inside me lets go.
I heard a Buddhist once declare that pain is inevitable, suffering is not. Could it be the same with aging—that it, along with death, is inevitable, but fretting about it isn’t? When I can just be with it, something inside me gives. A tear bubbles up. I experience first a sad cloud of resignation, then a silver lining of peace. I’ve found this to be an alternate way to cope with the aging process and its conclusion. It’s like the title of a book I once read (also Buddhist inspired), When You’re Falling, Dive.
MDMA AND DYING (OR, THE HIGH WAY HOME)
The final stage of aging, of course, is death. For so many terminal cancer and other patients, there are often existential needs that go unmet by modern medicine. One of these is the quest for meaning. According to author and philosopher Viktor Frankl, meaning can be found up to the moment of death. “Man is not destroyed by suffering,” he said. “He is destroyed by suffering without meaning.”3 In the absence of meaning, a person can fall into feelings of hopelessness, depression, despair, and a desire for a hastened death.
So nowadays scientists are researching MDMA (as well as psilocybin and other such compounds) to ascertain its usefulness to terminally ill people suffering from great anxiety about what is happening to them and what is about to happen. One of the researchers, Dr. Phil Wolfson, writes, “There is fear, bitterness, disappointment, confusion, why-me’s, and always a great desire to stick around We don’t expect our folks to become blissful and happy with their prospects. Rather we hope that through a sense of impermanence and accepting life’s terms—namely that we, as life arising, shall also inevitably cease—that they may find some relaxation in the midst of doing their best to survive.”4 So far, results have shown that MDMA can help the dying maintain or increase their quality of life.
Brave New World and The Doors of Perception author Aldous Huxley famously requested LSD from his wife on his death bed. I can see why. I look forward to the time when medicines like MDMA, LSD, and psilocybin are as available during the dying process as hospice and morphine. These ways in can help us on our way out.