The ugly truth was that Don was now paying a lot more than I was to support our habit. I could contribute only ten dollars a week, between my five-dollar allowance and the dollar a day I saved from my lunch money. He had become a manager at McDonald’s, working many hours a week. He had hardly any time to do homework, which caused his grades to suffer. One night, he was high at work, slipped on a bun, and slapped his entire right forearm against the grill on the way down. His arm was horribly burned, causing him to be bandaged up with enormous blisters—and he was unable to work for three weeks. After that, he quit the job and went into telemarketing. The company changed its name every six months to a year, and was trying to convince senior citizens to donate money so disabled, institutionalized children could see a magic show. Once you donated, they never, ever stopped bothering you, even if you asked them to take your name off the list. Don started doing this every day after school, and it was horrible, as almost everyone he spoke to was filled with hate and would hang up on him. He told me I really needed to pull my own weight and not depend on him to pay for our stuff, and he was right—so I joined him at All-Star Productions.
Every day after school, we would smoke weed in Don’s basement, split a huge eight-cup pot of coffee into two large Pyrex measuring cups, and slam them down before heading out to the bus stop, which was right near his house. Don was now losing weight just as I had done, and we called this the “Caffeine and Cannabis Diet.” We caught the number 52 bus into Schenectady and then used our transfer slips to catch the number 5, which took us up State Street. We would pull the yellow cord at our stop, but were not allowed to stand in front of the building if we got there early. Instead, we would walk through the cemetery, which was right next door, and smoke more. One of the graves had fallen in, which was quite frightening, and it was very creepy to walk around in there, but it was our best option.
The woman running the operation, whom we will call Dee Dee, was enormously overweight. She had a very short gray haircut, a massive double chin, a heavily upturned nose that made both of her nostrils fully visible, and piercing, heartless blue eyes that constantly scanned you over the top of her granny glasses. Her potbellied, balding husband, Frank, was hunched way over, completely crushed by her dominance. She ruled over us with an iron fist. Each week we were given cash payments in a tiny manila envelope with the amount written on the outside. I worked at a little card table and her daughter was behind me. Every night Frank would call out, “Five o’clock, time to smile and dial,” as our shift began.
Most people would either yell at us or hang up, but some of them were friendly senior citizens who apologized because they were on a fixed income. I ran the whole thing like a robot and hardly had to think about what I was saying, freeing up the rest of my mind to go wherever it wanted. I usually got a few sales a night—some twenty-fives and some tens. Dee Dee’s daughter was unceasingly friendly on the phone, and did far better than the rest of us. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Dad would drop me off there after martial arts class, causing me to miss the first ninety minutes of my shift—and I also had Fridays off so I could see Dad for the weekend. I made sixty-eight dollars a week on the average. Every night I was there, we would work straight through until nine p.m. I wouldn’t make it home until about nine forty-five, by the time I was done with the bus rides and the walking, so I had to get all my homework done in study hall in order not to fall behind.
This was an extremely depressing and horrible job, but when I did get some real interest, I felt genuinely happy that I would be helping disabled children have a better life—even just for that one day. I ended up working to help adults and children with disabilities for well over a year after I graduated college. One of the biggest things on my mind during this time was what schools I was going to apply to, because I definitely did not want to get stuck working a job like this for the rest of my life. The idea of not going to school was absolutely unthinkable, given the incredibly frightening pressure my parents had put on me. I found a copy of Rolling Stone in my father’s stack of magazines that listed the top ten “party schools” in America, and one of them was only ninety minutes away—a State University of New York (SUNY) school in New Paltz. I applied for it and got in, since my SAT scores were good and I wrote a creative, insightful essay about how I wanted to use my education to become a professional writer and psychologist.
Best of all, New Paltz was the closest school to Woodstock—and Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane had christened the wide-open athletic prairies in the back as the Tripping Fields. I would be going to school at one of the religious pilgrimage sites of the Woodstock hippie movement, so it seemed perfect when I got accepted. I wanted to party, and Rolling Stone told me this was where the party was. Little did I know that I would end up in the single most alcoholic suite within the single most alcoholic dorm in one of the single most alcoholic schools in the country, according to Rolling Stone magazine itself. I only found out about the infamous nature of the suite I lived in from university staff when I was in my senior year. I still held out for other schools that were more prestigious, but New Paltz was the only nibble I got—so the choice was made for me.
I started a new band in my senior year of high school with a blues guitarist named Jim who had blond hair and a crew cut, and was athletic but definitely countercultural. We had a few jams at the house and it sounded really good—almost like some of the classic Led Zeppelin acoustic blues songs. Before long, I found out that Jim had been a punk rocker who had worn studded black leather and chains, Doc Marten twelve-hole combat boots, and an enormous green mohawk haircut, with the sides of his head shaved bald, and multiple earrings in each ear. He had had a terrible LSD experience in a cemetery where a friend of his had lain on top of a grave, and a horrible demonic figure had seemed to take over his friend’s face and body. The demon had then leered at him and tried to attack him. This traumatized him so deeply that his life started falling apart—and ultimately he was sent to a place called Conifer Park. It was an imposing brick institution way out in Glenville, shrouded in pine trees.
Within our drug community, everyone called this place “Connie,” and it was considered to be a terrifying dungeon of hell. Your parents would shell out ten thousand dollars for you to leave school and be imprisoned and indoctrinated there for an entire month. If you got busted, a judge could force you to go to Connie and your parents had to pay for it—and it cost almost two thousand dollars more than my mother made in half a year. Worst of all, some people who went to Connie were actually brainwashed into not wanting to get high anymore, and Jim was one of them. He was reaching out to me, smiling a lot and telling me I would be much happier without weed. I felt I was looking at a man who had been completely mind-controlled by whatever cult they had formed over at Connie, and I gave him the nickname Jimmychrist, which became the unofficial title of our band. Jim was such a good musician that I was willing to listen to him roll out his manifesto each time we met—but once he realized I wasn’t going to stop, Jimmychrist quickly fizzled. We still sat together in school for lunch, but that was about it.
Don and I had gotten some gooey black opium in a little square of pink plastic wrap as a one-time deal. It wasn’t very powerful and smelled like incense. We were smoking it in the basement belonging to a bodybuilder we will call Paul one afternoon when Paul told us about a bad dream he’d had. He was smoking a pipe when it suddenly turned into a sickle of death, and began slicing out his muscles. I knew dreams conveyed powerful meanings, and it probably was true that weed was reducing his muscle mass. Suddenly, his fundamentalist Christian mother burst in the door, smelled the smoke, and knew exactly what we were doing. She glared at Don and asked him what he was hiding in his hand. He said, “A bowl,” and showed it to her with a chuckle. She started screaming, ordered us out of the house, and sent Paul to Connie. That was it. After Connie, Paul completely stopped smoking. He had obviously been brainwashed and we felt very bad for him. We were extremely relieved that his mother didn’t try to send us to Connie as well. We got lucky.
Not long after this, we were smoking with Baner and his cousin while Baner was staying at a friend’s house. Somehow the cousin’s mother tracked him to our location, and she showed up downstairs while we were all smoking. She saw that her son’s eyes were red, smelled the smoke on him, and he was caught. She screamed in Baner’s face, ordered her son to get in the car, and hauled him off to Connie. Once again it seemed like we had narrowly escaped the jaws of death. If she had bothered to come upstairs, she might have spotted us and called the cops, and that would have been it. We would have all faced criminal charges, and the judge would have either made us “voluntarily” go to Connie or end up in a juvenile home, which was probably even worse—and could lead to a criminal record.
The stress of working the full-time telemarketing job and doing all the classes at school became far too much for Don to handle. He completely gave up on going to class, and like me, he was wearing brightly colored tie-dye hippie clothing to school. Don went even farther than I was willing to go, and wore very attention-grabbing tie-dye pants with a spiraling pattern of bright white, blue, and pink. He became quite a spectacle for the kids in school, as every day there would be sightings of him walking around across the street—going to the Dairy Queen, smoking cigarettes outside, clutching a cup of coffee, and buying more smokes at the gas station next door.
I started going down to the senior lounge during study hall, and brought my mother’s old Rider-Waite Tarot card deck from the early 1970s to school. Mom had stopped using them after someone got the Death card when asking about a friend of theirs, and that friend later died in a car crash. I didn’t consider accurate prophecies to be a bad thing—in fact that was exactly what I wanted. I thoroughly studied both of the books Mom had on giving Tarot card readings, memorized the meaning of every card, and had gotten good at it. Every day I would give people Tarot card readings and the results were very impressive, earning me quite a reputation as a freak. People would often try to hide the real issue they were asking me about, but as soon as I started to interpret the cards they drew, their eyes would widen in amazement. I identified relationship problems, issues with their schoolwork, arguments with their friends and family, dreams for their future in college, and even major secrets that would have gotten them in trouble if anyone ever found out. Their palms would add additional corroborating details. Some kids got so freaked out that they stood up and walked away, saying, “I can’t do this. I can’t do this!”
I wrote my first fiction story during this time, and would often work on it in school. Instead of using my computer, I wrote it longhand into a spiral-bound notebook, which made it look like normal schoolwork. The slowness of longhand writing made me consider the words far more carefully. My story was based on some visions I had from using LSD and other psychedelics, as well as the Castenada books and movies like Altered States and Prince of Darkness. The main character was Harry, an anthropologist who had gone to investigate an alleged UFO crash site and found a brain-shaped cactus growing in the crater. Although he could not identify what it was, a Native American shaman told him it was a very rare and special sacrament, and he ended up eating some of it. The cactus caused Harry to get stuck into a massive, LSD-style trip that never ended—but he still was trying his best to go to work and live a normal life. The problem was that this drug caused him to see what was really going on all around him—both the good and the bad.
Harry was seeing swimmy, geometric patterns all around him, and was plagued with little demonic creatures that were everywhere. Most people could not see them, but under the influence of the brain cactus he knew where they were at all times. He was really starting to lose control, and would scream and throw things at them whenever he saw them. They did whatever they could to terrify him and drive him crazy. The creatures could only get into his house through a mirror, so Harry had taped cardboard over all the mirrors in his house for protection. On the positive side, he had made friends with one of his houseplants, who had kind words of encouragement for him—but by far his greatest ally was John, his “house ghost.” This was a being who was assigned to be his guardian angel, more or less, and watch over him. The house ghost knew Harry had the potential to use his newfound abilities for positive purposes, but first he had to help Harry get his life together. They were fighting a spiritual battle—and Harry would be needed on the front lines.
After Harry left for work, John removed the cardboard on one of his full-length mirrors and used it as a portal into an alternate reality. Here he was more comfortable—and could get his own equivalent of the daily news. By John’s leaving the mirror uncovered, a very large and menacing eight-foot-tall demon managed to get into Harry’s house—and made the whole situation much more dangerous. The demon was jet-black in color and had reptilian-human features. John was then given an emergency super-charge of new energy in order to fight the demon. An older, wiser being sat in between two crystal obelisks, and gave John permission to get a major energetic upgrade for the battle. The obelisks went from obsidian black to bright white and then struck John with lightning—causing him to experience a massive consciousness shift akin to ascension.
Once the story reached this point, I couldn’t see the rest of it—and it remained unfinished. I let Brad borrow the notebooks for a couple of days and he was amazed at the quality of the writing. He told me it was great and I should do more. At the time I had no idea there was any deeper layer to what I was writing—although it did fit in nicely with the dreams I had as a child.
I was still watching TV when I had the chance, such as on weekends, and the media was involved in tremendous fearmongering. The president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, had invaded the little country of Kuwait, and now the US was threatening to attack him if he didn’t withdraw. Every news program I saw about this said that a war was inevitable—and would create a “domino effect,” escalating into biblical Armageddon in the Middle East. Every country would be swept up into the battle, and it would lead to a nuclear war that would destroy most, if not all, of the life on Earth. Every talking head on television described this scenario in meticulous detail, complete with charts and graphs, and made it sound as if there was absolutely nothing we could do to stop it. Then, to make matters even worse, the Bush administration was going to strike Iraq as early as January 15, even though we were told this would quickly lead to global thermonuclear disaster.
My response to this stress was to use drugs and alcohol even more. On the very minute it became January 15, 1991, the US attacked Iraq in an absolutely massive bombing campaign they called “Shock and Awe”—which sounded exactly like Hitler’s blitzkrieg, or “lightning war.” I ended up standing on a popular intersection of Route 50 near the local military base and protesting the new war with our local Amnesty International club. We made picket signs and shouted chants like “No Blood for Oil.” A surprising number of people honked their horns and waved in support. Not one person did anything hateful toward us. Even as the government was perpetuating fear and anger, trying to make everyone feel that this war was essential for our safety and survival, we were getting a surprisingly high amount of goodwill. We could clearly see that the public did not want war, and they were not falling for the fear-mongering stories being fed to them in the media.
Shortly after the war started, I was sitting alone on the couch one night when there was no work, and I felt a sudden, very strong compulsion to look at the television. It was eight p.m. exactly. Normally I would just feel glad that I realized it was prime time, and see what there was to watch. Now I was looking at things a little differently. I already knew that the TV and VCR were giving off a high-pitched noise, since it bothered me tremendously on LSD—and the pitch had suddenly changed in frequency. This would be inaudible to most people, but under the influence of psychedelics I could hear the electricity humming through the walls and was very sensitive to sounds that most people’s minds would block out. This change in pitch happened precisely at eight p.m. I had the same incredibly cosmic feelings as I had had when I saw the 3:33, except this time it was extremely negative. I did not turn on the TV.
This was not a one-time thing. After I discovered it, I was able to catch it happening again and again, right at eight p.m., without being under the influence of any drugs—and it really freaked me out. Subliminal messages were supposed to be illegal—but here they were. Someone was doing this—and once you started watching television, you were inundated with terror about the Gulf War. From then on, any time I wanted to relax in the living room alone, I would unplug the TV and the VCR completely, which was the only way to kill the sound. This also made the commercials seem even more sinister to me than they already were.
I started talking to a girl named Debbie, who was very attractive. For a while we seemed to be really getting along very well—until I told her I was a marijuana smoker and invited her to a party. She became very upset and wrote me a letter saying she wished she could make me stop. This was quite a shock. I saved her letter and still have it in my files. It was another sign that I was only getting farther and farther away from my goals the more I smoked.
Another shocking wake-up call happened on one of the last days of high school, when we had just gotten our yearbooks and everyone was writing their good-byes to one another. A brown-haired, exotic-looking girl I had been very attracted to for years wrote me a long letter on the right half of an entire page. She spoke about me in very glowing terms, but the “big reveal” was at the end: “PS. . . . You have absolutely gorgeous eyes.” Although she wanted to pay me a compliment, I was devastated to hear this only after having known her for six years. I had ignored every signal that would have been bright, flashing neon signs for most normal guys, including her coming to the house for some of my parties—even though she never smoked.
One day I was driving with Don and Bob and Ben in the hippie van. We were heading up State Street in Schenectady, and all of us were smoking weed. Suddenly, two cop cars simultaneously turned their sirens on. They were behind us and seemed to have arrived out of nowhere. My body surged with so much panic I thought I was going to have a heart attack. Ben pulled the van over, crushed in defeat. All of us felt as if our lives were over. We had enough drugs in the car to be charged with at least a misdemeanor and felt we were minutes away from starting our new lives as convicts. The cop cars then raced on past us, with their sirens and lights blazing. All of us breathed out a massive surge of adrenaline. We were very happy that we didn’t get caught, but we had already died a thousand deaths in the time it took for us to realize that we were not the ones being pulled over.
Things were getting worse and worse for me toward the end of the school year. I was completely burned out from going to school, working the telemarketing job every night, and having a daily marijuana and caffeine habit. I had Friday nights off from my job so I could visit my father for the weekend, but there was a two-hour gap before he would pick me up when I could smoke. That afternoon I had a very nasty confrontation with my mother about the house not being clean enough, followed by a phone call from my father during which he really yelled at me about my grades. I felt completely dead and numb inside. Bob, the big football player, showed up and just walked into my room—but I had nothing to offer him. I just stared at the wall, my eyes glazed over, and smoked. I did not look at him or say anything. “You’re a drug addict, man. You need to get some help.” That got me talking. Him, of all people. I became very defensive—but when I thought back on that moment later on, I realized he was right. More and more, I was losing control.
We had a senior picnic on the last day of school before graduation, and I decided to say good-bye to my prison by taking a yellow micro-dot. This was a drug that was given to patients with severe psychiatric disorders in hospitals, and it was deliberately tiny so it could be inserted in food or swallowed very easily. We had certain people on the inside who were smuggling it out and selling it, calling it “mescaline”—and one dot was a very intense trip. As I walked along, I was seeing a shadowy, demonic being—like a living cloud of darkness—jumping around on the athletic bleachers. It definitely seemed to know I could see it and it was trying to distract me and capture my attention. Right then, a Frisbee slammed into my chest at top speed. It hit me in the sternum, which is the vertical bone in the middle, and pinged off me with a loud noise, flying another twenty-five feet. I was so messed up I just kept on walking, and didn’t look at the people who threw it or say anything—which made me seem extremely weird to say the least.
I told one of the mullet-wearing drug-dealing kids from the corner that I had taken a yellow hospital micro-dot. He was on his bike, as was another kid, and he challenged me to a bike race—even though I didn’t have a bike. We left the school grounds, since none of us wanted to be there, and I ran with them all the way to the railroad tracks. The micro-dot seemed to eliminate any pain from athletic exertion, and since my job was to follow them, I held it together even though my mind was extremely altered. Once we got to the railroad tracks, we started smoking—and then a beaver appeared about twenty-five feet away and looked at us with great curiosity. The guys paused for a few seconds, as if they were checking to see if this was really real—and then they all started picking up rocks and trying to kill the beaver. When I refused, they pressured me into throwing some as well, so I made sure to miss by a huge amount. Thankfully, they were both too stoned and uncoordinated to hit the beaver, and it quickly fled.
We then had another bike race as we returned to the now-empty school, and I went back inside. I still hadn’t cleared out my locker, and this was my last chance. Everyone else was still outside at the picnic. I walked up to locker number 2168, just like always, and rolled in the combination that had been my life for the last four years: 36-24-36. I pulled up on the latch, opened the door, and looked at myself in the little mirror. I could hardly believe what I saw. My pupils were so dilated as to be almost completely black. My skin was extremely pale. I had huge dark circles under my eyes. I was twitchy and had trouble staying still. And worst of all, I was drenched in sweat, and my hair looked totally crazy, fanning out in all different directions with drops of liquid falling off it everywhere. I looked like a severe drug addict, strung out on crystal meth. It wasn’t good—at all.
Then, to make matters even worse, my old AV teacher with the thick glasses showed up. John was in his late twenties or early thirties, had short blond hair that once had been very long, and was definitely a geek. Now he walked up to me and he could see I was very, very messed up. He told me to take care of myself and that I really should get out of there and go home. I knew he was telling me that if anyone saw me like this, I would be immediately arrested. I was so close to freedom that it would be a shame to ruin my whole life on the very last minute of the very last day of school. This caused me to have a tremendous panic attack, because I knew he was right. I completely abandoned everything in my locker, leaving it for the cleanup crew to deal with—all the books, all the homework papers, any pens or supplies, any clothes, my mirror, you name it—and I fled. This moment would haunt me in my dreams for the next twenty years, as I abandoned two pieces of jewelry I had spent countless hours sculpting in class. If I’d had any idea at the time how much that trauma would repeat in nightmares, I would have risked everything to save my art.
When I received my high school diploma on stage at the Proctors Theater in Schenectady, it felt completely hollow and empty, despite the roar of the huge crowd. I had made it out of prison with a degree, but I was a complete mess. Worst of all, I had won the Martin J. Mahoney Award for Personal and Academic Progress. This was almost certainly because I had lost weight and cut my hair—but in reality, I had just learned to hide my addiction much better than before.
During the ceremony, a girl from my homeroom made it very clear that I could have had her as my girlfriend if I had bothered to pay attention to all the signals she was sending me. I was kicking myself inside. Here was yet another example of how disconnected I had become from the things that mattered. I planned out my whole night as my friends and I drove away in a car with cans tied all down the back on strings, clattering away as we honked the horns and created chaos. I ended up tripping, drinking, and smoking at the graduation party I went to. I hardly remember anything that happened to me that night, other than drinking wine coolers and seeing some kids peeing into the gas tank of the car in the garage. Don had not graduated, and had decided he would just get his GED later on—no big deal.
That summer, my whole crew decided to take LSD together and go to another postgraduation party. Brad, Baner, Don, and I were all dosed out. Someone had told Don and Baner that you could drink as much as you wanted when you were tripping and you would never get drunk. They ended up playing an extremely dangerous drinking game called Anchorman, in which you bounce quarters into a glass. The “anchorman” on the losing team ends up drinking whatever is left of a full pitcher of beer that his teammate could not finish.30
Both Baner and Don suffered near-deadly alcohol poisoning from playing Anchorman. Don had gone into a very bad trip, scaring everyone in the party by asking them if they wanted to see a huge Islamic assassination knife called a gukari. He ended up being banished outside the house. Then he threw up all over himself, covering his favorite tie-dye outfit in red, horrible-smelling beer-and-pizza vomit. He had definitely acted very threatening toward me earlier in the party, when he was going through the worst part of his trip, and I did not want to see him.
Baner was camped out with his head over a toilet, and had three beautiful women there to nurse him. By this point, the number of women he had slept with was over eighty. He figured out the approximate number only after an extensive interview from Brad during which he tried to recall each girl one by one. He drunkenly waved one finger at me as I walked by, smiled, and did not speak. His eyes were barely able to open. Girls started telling me that Don was begging for my help outside and I really should go out and see him, so I finally did. I had no idea how bad it was going to be. Don was so drunk he could barely move, and was sprawled out on the wheelchair-accessible ramp, with one of his legs draping over the side. The gukari had gone missing and we never saw it again. After I got his ruined jacket and long-sleeved shirt off, leaving just a T-shirt and pants, I rinsed them off in the bathtub and dragged him into the house.
This was where things got crazy. Don was so severely alcohol-poisoned that he had become blind. His field of vision was completely black. He couldn’t see my face or anything in front of him, even with his glasses on—although he could hear my voice. His heartbeat was irregular and he was terrified that he was going to die. Since I was having a wildly intense bad trip, this seemed to go on for thirty hours’ worth of psychological time.
He was crying and begging me to call his girlfriend, even though by this point it was one forty-five a.m. I told him if he did that, both of us were going to jail or Connie. I knew he had vomited out the alcohol already, and I tried to get him hydrated. The most shocking aspect of what happened was that everyone just stepped over us as if we weren’t even there. Not one person asked me if I needed anything or if he was okay. I had what seemed like countless hours to reflect on how disconnected we are from one another. I finally walked him home at sunrise, and thankfully there was no one out on the roads that Sunday morning—only the birds and the squirrels. It took well over an hour to get him home because he could barely walk, and I was still under the influence the entire time. I never got a chance to sleep before having to spend the whole day with my father at an outdoor concert. I felt my life slipping away. It was only a matter of time before I either died or got arrested.
In order to keep my parents happy, I took a depressing job at Eat at Joe’s, a hot dog and ice-cream vendor at the Rotterdam Square Mall. One slow night I decided to drink seventeen cups of oily black coffee in a row to see if I could get high from it. I became extremely agitated and nervous, started breathing too much, and then crashed tremendously after about an hour and a half. I soon became so tired that I could barely move my arms. A gallon bucket of chocolate sauce dumped all over the floor because I did not have enough strength to carry it.
Right then, a hefty guy with a baseball cap came up with an army of kids and ordered nine different ice-cream cones. He listed off the order at an extremely high speed, as if I had a photographic memory for flavors, sprinkles, and sauces. I was so overwhelmed that I told him “one at a time” in an irritated tone of voice. That night, I dropped LSD at eleven thirty p.m. and had a horrible experience. I was unable to sleep as my heart slammed in my chest and the ceiling squirmed. I had to go back to work the next afternoon, had never slept, and was still under the influence. My manager looked like the ultimate heroin junkie, with pale skin, very dark circles under his eyes, and several missing teeth. He went into a total psychopathic rage, screaming at me with a murderous, demonic face, because the ice-cream guy had come back to complain about my attitude. I apologized in stunned terror and continued working there as if nothing had happened.
That same summer, MTV was airing a very sarcastic, shaming commercial—and for me, it was the last straw. There was a black screen with dramatic music and a series of words. Each set of words would appear long enough to read, fade out, and then the next set would appear. In total, it said: “These are words. They could be doing something funny, or cool, or interesting. But they’re not. They’re just sitting there. LIKE YOU.” This made me very angry. I worked hard and watched MTV only when I had some precious time to relax. Television had nothing to offer me, and I quit. I didn’t own one when I went to college and I didn’t care. Now I am glad to be a force for good by starring in Ancient Aliens on the History Channel, and sharing information that can help wake people up from the lies and myths of mainstream reality. Television is a tool for communication, and we still need more shows that help raise our collective consciousness. One of the greatest secrets many insiders revealed to me is that the laws of physics respond directly to our thoughts and beliefs. If enough of us believe we can fly, we may authorize the laws of physics to allow that to start happening on a large-scale level.
We continued taking martial arts classes right up until I was going to start college. Dad decided that he and Michael would stop going after I left. Our final test was to receive three perfect punches, with focus, directly into the solar plexus while we were in Spirit, holding our basic stance. A perfect punch to the solar plexus is bad enough, but once you add focus it will dangerously knock the air out of your lungs if you are not trained. When the time came, I took a huge, sharp inhale through my nose, locked my abdominal muscles into a wall, punched into my stance, and went as strongly into Spirit as I ever had. My consciousness was dramatically altered. Time slowed down. I had “tunnel vision” and the feeling of electrical tingles all over my body. Huge impulses of movement surged through my body as each punch connected—but I did not feel pain, and I did not break my stance. I had passed the final test. I was ready.
I was going through a short summer orientation at New Paltz in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. I was eating lunch in the Hasbrouck Dining Hall as tanks were advancing on the Kremlin. This was the end of the threat of nuclear war as we knew it—or at least it greatly reduced the risk. The media had built the USSR up to be the greatest super-villain of all time, equal to the US in every way—and now it was falling. Most of the incoming freshmen were drinking and a fair number were smoking weed—and no one seemed to care. I was one of the only people actually watching what was going on. Everyone else seemed bored, depressed, and uninvolved in their lives. I almost wanted to jump up on the table and yell at everyone: “Do you see what is going on here? Do you understand what this is? The greatest super-villain of the twentieth century—our nuclear nemesis—is collapsing right before your eyes! Can I get a hip-hip-hooray?”
That was much too radical of an idea. If these kids couldn’t see what was happening, and that this would make our planet much safer, there wasn’t much I could do for them. This was a party school, and the majority of kids were drinking and doing drugs. Insiders later told me that this scene was exactly what the Cabal wanted. By traumatizing the public repeatedly enough, most people will resort to alcohol, pharmaceuticals, and other drugs to numb the pain. Eventually their senses become so deadened that even a very positive burst of news cannot penetrate the gloom. They no longer pose any threat to tyranny and will just lie there and let themselves be conquered. Psychologists call this “learned helplessness.” I also realized that the military-industrial complex must have seen this collapse coming, since the USSR had been fragmenting for at least the last year and a half. My parents always told me you need to line up a new job before you quit the old one. The elite’s new job was Iraq—but the “domino effect” never happened. Although many nations sent troops to support the war effort in Iraq, there was no Armageddon in the Middle East. I took another bite of my sandwich, chewed quietly, and continued watching the little screen alone.