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Re: why pot before looping?



Title: Re: why pot before looping?
How marvelous it must feel to be so right.

Can we get back to the important subject at hand now...how do ya'll compose/perform in a live setting? It's a subject that will be more interesting to everyone else on the list and less interesting to Mr. Ashcroft.

From: Paulzric@aol.com
Reply-To: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com
Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 21:16:46 EDT
To: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com
Subject: Re: why pot before looping?
Resent-From: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com
Resent-Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 21:16:51 -0400


Only drug users defend using drugs. All drugs are a cop-out. It may take one years
to figure it out, but I have never watched a drug user who continues to use drugs do
anything with his/her life. I have only watched countless, and I mean countless,
musicians who spent (and still spend) all of their energy buying kine bud, getting
high morning, noon, and night, forget gig dates, forget phonenumbers, forget key
changes, forget their ass, hook the outputs out of the inputs, forget how to route a
VST wrapper, play their basses drenched in reverb and delays thinking it sounds
cool, stop after setting up a TON of equipment to go get stoned and come back
and 'noid out in front of their gear, choke when speaking to the audience...the list
goes on. All of my former band members use(d) pot in excess and will defend it
more loquaciously than anything I have read here are still only successes in their
own personal hall of fame. As a matter of fact, my former drummer has a horrendous
smokers hack and he aint smokin' cigarettes. All pot users will voice their opinions
in favor of pot exactly like the denizens of the Isle of the Lotos Eaters. It's the same
predictable, self-serving, stoner bullshit that I have heard for years. I'm through
writing about pot. It's a trap. Give it up if you use it and rejoin your human mind.
The psychedelic thing is really something else. Psylocibin fungus on your neurons.
Big deal. So you join the fungus phylum for a while and realize "wow, this is a planet." Yep. It's a planet. Okay, now what?
Cocaine? Pure craziness and a capitalists wet dream.
Heroin. More madness.
LSD? Okay, so maybe--maybe--if you're lucky, you get some real LSD and pitch
a no-hitter. So what. It isn't you. It is you on the drug. Once is cool, but like anything,
you get hooked and can't perform without it and you are a great big fake.

Musicians who can only perform high:
Any repeated behavior results ina  refined performance. So if you are a musician
who repeats behaviors while stoned, then you will learn and only be able to reliably
replicate these behaviors while stoned. It is a trap that the body has created for
itself. The only way out is to quit and relearn. That's it. Disagree all you want, but it's all in order to vehemently defend a crutch.
Recreational drug use is for cheaters.
Now, I highly doubt anyone reading this is a shaman or some other bonafide mystic,
otherwise you'd not be bothering with internets and mailing lists and musical
equipment, but rather be preparing a medicine bag with animal bones or divining water
with a stick or whatever a true shaman does. I believe that the sacred substances
of this planet belong to them and to them alone. All these kids driving around in
Mustangs, smoking pot, going to class and staring vacant eyed at me (yes, I'm a
teacher and I see firsthand just how fucked up people are who use drugs, how
self-deluded and seduced by their peer structure and support system and the whole
hunter/gathering routine) are plugging up the psychic ether for the rest of earnest
people who would rather meditate and get to know the wonders of the universe
without a barrage of confusion and sloppy intention. They can't retain and can't learn.
I have not had one kid who supported pot do better than ones who do not. Period. The pot users always give themselves away, at least in my classes. It is so easy to manipulate a discussion in order to discover who favors pot. It's hilarious. And the ones who obviously have never seen it or are still so innocent that they haven't tried simply do naturally better at everything: their memory works, they are present, on time, alert, etc.
I'm through. I can't convince anyone to stop. All I can say is there is no
valid rationalization an active drug user can offer in defense of his or her self-
destructive, mind-altering blackhole of a habit. None. John Lilly, Terrence McKenna, Timothy Leary, Norman Mailer, Poe, Hunter S., that freak Crowley, or the countelss
musicians who have used drugs could have done so much more without. The body
degenerates all by itself. A few doors opened by drug use is fine. Sustained and
persistent use is a trap. I am telling you, read Isle...

Now those who have bothered to read this entire message will hopefully discern a
distinction between active, defensive drug users and those who have dived deep
into the thickest of it, seen far-out (man) and wildly neurotic/exotic places and have come back only to realize..."fuck...that was cool but it can't last." Because, my
good brothers, one has to come to realize that any drug dependency is a trap.
Dependency is a trap. The best kind, perhaps...but a trap nonetheless.
Amen.