xk3m_indica said:

I've started up school. At last. One of the more senior students at this college, seeing as I'm basically repeating year 12 (I dropped out halfway through 2005 to move to Melbourne and eat lots of pills, which really wrecked me).

My first 'assignment' this year was to model a piece of writing on a short story he handed out yesterday. The story was about 200 words, and basically about a lust for oranges. It was a pretty useless story and had no real social value, other than to express the writers opinion that oranges are the sunshine of the fruit kingdom.
But what for? What the fuck inspires someone to write prose about an orange? I'd re-type it and post it here, but I don't have the fucking patience to read about someones taste in oranges. And frankly, it's a blatant braggery of writing skills. Fuck off.
Surely there are better things that can be scribbled onto paper than a desire for oranges? I don't understand how this can be so fashionable. It's simply childish.
The piece itself was rather childish as well.

Anyway, so I went and started writing a piece exploring something outside of the general psyche. Going towards a more trans-dimensional piece. Explainging my thoughts on other aspects of reality. Or something like that. Basically, outside of the box. Outside reality. Not sci-fi, it's non fiction, but hard to grasp for people who've never eaten drugs. Fair enough, not saying they should eat drugs, but be open minded to these thoughts.
Ok, so basically I just cut down and re-wrote (very briefly, I might add) one of my old mushroom trips. Kind of meshed in a few other trip reports in there as well.
It mostly just sort of went into describing the experience, without going too much into the actual drugged nature of it all.
Fair enough, it's a touchy subject. Drugs, that is. Especially with an older generation of teachers who have probably never gone further than their 4th glass of red wine. But, I mean... for fucks sake... you simply cannot hang around in the same genre and topics of writing. There is a need for other topics to be touched on and written about. Throw some variety into literature, instead of writing behind laws that govern our lives.
My teacher read the first few lines of the piece (which aren't the best lines in it, but keep in mind this is still a first draft and needs to be heavily edited to come up to pre-tertiary literature standards... it has a lot of bits which are lacking power, and a lot of things are repeated... but it is a first draft, these things are to be expected...) and then he turned to me and said

"ok, you are taking a big risk here. It is obvious to me that you have taken LSD sometime in your life??"

(he saw the word 'lysergically' in there, clever man... he knows what it means..)

"Yes." I said.

"Ok, well you need to understand that the assessors are going to look at this and be a little intimidated by the topic. You are going to the furthest ends of the spectrum of literature. Probably going a little too far out of reasonable topics, especially for school. I like your style of writing, but I have to question your credibility... have you actually been there?"

My head started screaming to me. 'what the FUCK? is this man sitting here blatantly saying that I have not experienced these feelings? This experience never happened in my life? How dare he. Would I write this if I didn't know about it? I doubt this man has ever tried acid, or mushrooms... let alone have the ability to articulate the experience'

Which I thought I've done quite well in the past. Many experienced trippers have read my reports and agreed that it's a fine way of documenting said experiences. But I took the next step. I took it to the classroom. To start training myself in the field of writing this way... to try and spin off into some whole other wild style of writing never seen before in the writing world.
Granted, it's been done before like greats such as Ram Dass, McKenna and Leary... but nevertheless... it is going to need a new generation of fresh writers who understand the mistakes of our predecessors to try and bring the genre back into light. There is something in the psychedelic realm that can benefit mankind, it's without a doubt. Drakonian laws outlaw such substances which is a shame, but there is little we can do about it without a great wealth of intelligent, well-meaning and positive minded individuals who care to try and bring this to light in a more 'socially acceptable' manner.

"How old are you?" my teacher asked me.

"19"

"Do you know anything about Pink Floyd?" he asked.

"I guess so."

"Do you know the lead singer?" he was looking at me as if he was teaching me something I could never grasp. That cocky smug look they get when they think they're one step up from you in the food chain.

"Sid Barret?" I mused.

"And do you know what happened to him?"

"He got messed up on drugs and now is a pretty scattery old man, I understand" I don't think my words really showed him how much I actually understand all this crap.

"What kind of drugs?" he asked me, again... cocky.

"LSD. Plenty of it. They used to spike his breakfast cereal with it. That man ate a lot of LSD. Definately." I basically spewed out information I'd read on him somewhere before.

"And so, you understand how this is going to be a touchy subject with assessors. You are really stretching someones imagination to try and express this piece to them and help them accept the fact that this piece was influenced by a drug experience"

Basically, he was confining me to a fucking box. Saying that it was inappropriate for me write this kind of stuff. If this man had seen and experience the things I had, I doubt he would even THINK about daring to question my credibility.
The fact he asked me if I had really experienced this, as if I was a little kid repeating somethnig I'd read in a Leary book or an anti-LSD pamphlet, really offended me. And then he had the nerve to try and tell me to 'think INSIDE the square'.

So, basically wipe out my memory of this shit and start over, writing about fucking oranges and how loud my friends snore and all sorts of other benign pointless shit that has no real foothold in the real world, other than for old fucks like him to read and show to a bunch of dead shit kids in his class. Training the masses to think on such a small scale that they will never question the big bad world around them.

This needs to be done.

The imagination needs to be PUSHED. Imagine the ideas that could come out if teachers stopped training to kids to follow in the footsteps of other writers and just write what they want? Instead of saying "I want you to follow this piece of writing... model a piece on it, about a topic you like. But it has to be on this track..." so like, ok... I'll just spend my entire fucking writing life filling up someone elses mold. Nah, fuck that. I go my own way.

I'm going to bend this teacher. I'm going to show him I'm not conforming to anything. The best writers were always controversial. Always pushing and making new limits. No-one is going to tell me otherwise.
I'm not going to conform to prose about fucking fruit.
Anyway, here is my piece... keep in mind it is far from finished, as you will see... it is supposed to be 200 words, I think I stretched it to 750, and even that was hard to compress down to... but I think the word limit is the only thing I should have been criticised on.



_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
I’ve been there. And back again. I’ve died and been reborn. I’ve seen the other side. Beyond fathomable reason, I’ve seen the wonders of the psychic plain.
I’ve been there.
It is nearly impossible to comprehend the nothingness that exists outside our box. A vast wealth of knowledge, truth, wisdom, life, light, purity and quasi-dimensional existence. The mind recoils in horror. It was never designed to see these things. A lysergically induced state of total awe that is too hard to bring back. Trying to explain to people the miracles you have just witnessed proves impossible. Words do not do any justice. Complete befuddlement ensues. It is hopeless.
Time, space, self-awareness, ego, life, a skerrick of recognition… everything you’ve ever known and held dear and true disappears within a space of time that is nothing, and even the memory of it goes as well.
Fear is not an option, mostly because it doesn’t even exist. It is a worthless emotion that you will eventually have to relearn, so that the mind can correctly react instinctively to the bizarre realm you have just seen.
I’ve been there.
I’ve seen the other side of reason. Logic is completely worthless. But it is longed for. This bizarre, new, foreign world and way of thinking is almost too much to handle. You feel like you’ve really been thrown in the deep end, without any kind of life-saver. And there is no-one to console you other than yourself, and your pathetic, whimpering little conscience, whatever that may be in this garbled, morphing, twisted and relentlessly howling world.
The fundamental laws of the universe are dissipated and spat upon. Everything you’ve ever been told becomes a meaningless blip in time, a laughable ideal that could never have worked had the voice of reason been so mercilessly ripped away like this.
Then a voice comes from out of nowhere, but not a voice… a whisper, and not even that. A silent breeze in your field of awareness, and what little of it has been hung, drawn, quartered and then stretched across the entire span of the universe.
All your problems and all the lies you’ve ever told yourself come hurtling back at you at an incredible amount of speed, then the thing you feel next is pure sadness and shame.
A longing to have lived right, a wallowing so deep it defies emotion.
The voice begins to lull you into a state of trance. You leave your physical body, and then all of a sudden you become aware that you once existed as that.
You ascend silently and slowly. All the while clawing at your body, trying desperately in vain to return and live again.
But the voice is effortlessly dragging you away to the heavens.
“You’ve done it. This is it. This is the end for you. You’ve passed the peak of your physical life. And now, you must be here. Remember.
"Now you can understand what you have done to yourself. Death is not the end of life. Death is a period of reflection on your life. You were given your time on earth to make as many memories and as much good energy as you could, so that when your life passes you would have eternity to live and enjoy those memories. Enjoy the fruits of your labour. Death is not dying, death is life in itself. Death is a new life for you, but now you have finished it. Death is a privilege you earn when you are done on earth. Physical existence is a miniscule fraction of what life really is. Look at the earth…" at that moment, you see the planet you once dwelled upon. It is ugly, hideous, huge and disgusting like a cyst in the cosmos. Yet somehow, it is still beautiful.
It holds life.
And hope.
"You were put there to enjoy what little time you had, and you cut it short for yourself. I am afraid you are stuck here and there is nothing you can do but live in what little memories you made for yourself." The voice disappears and you open your eyes. Your life flashes before you in insanely surreal and terrifying technicolour, not once, but several times. You see everything. Your entire childhood. Your whole life. All your memories of sadness and happiness come flooding through you like electricity.

And then something peaks, snaps, and disappears.
And you awaken.
With hope that today is the day of a new start.
I’ve been there.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

You get the idea. Perhaps a little intimidating, granted... but it's something new that needs to be given a chance.

Thinking outside the sqaure we live in. It's so fed tous this way, then told to get back in the box and dare not venture outside again... I'm sorry I'm not standing for that.

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Quote:

If I were your teacher, and you went 500 words over the limit, and wrote like that...I'd be hard pressed to pass you. Sorry.

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Brugman said:

Seems like Teach was trying to help you out, but your teenage rebellion took over.

Maybe he's trying to teach you a lesson about how to succeed in the "in the box" real life. Do the outside the box stuff on your own time.

Just a suggestion, not trying to offend in any way.

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I really enjoyed what you wrote though.

Quote:

My first 'assignment' this year was to model a piece of writing on a short story he handed out yesterday. The story was about 200 words, and basically about a lust for oranges. It was a pretty useless story and had no real social value, other than to express the writers opinion that oranges are the sunshine of the fruit kingdom.
But what for? What the fuck inspires someone to write prose about an orange? I'd re-type it and post it here, but I don't have the fucking patience to read about someones taste in oranges. And frankly, it's a blatant braggery of writing skills. Fuck off.
Surely there are better things that can be scribbled onto paper than a desire for oranges? I don't understand how this can be so fashionable. It's simply childish.
The piece itself was rather childish as well.

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