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Experience

A Gun Drawn

May 24, 2026
Addiction, Experience
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A gun drawn on you will bring you out of a blackout.

People comply with a gun. In movies we don’t think about the mechanics of it; in real life, the automaticity is total. It bypasses consciousness, as if the body recognizes guns at an instinctual level. I wasn’t weighing options or calculating risk. I was responding to electrical impulses originating in the amygdala.

“Freeze. Put your hands up.”

I realized my hands were up before I decided to put them there. One moment I was drunkenly trying to find a way through the bushes or trees, I wasn’t quite sure; the next, everything was organized around the singular fact that there was a gun drawn on me.

I was not particularly afraid. But I understood with precision that if I miscalculated this interaction, I could actually die.

“Higher.”

My hands went higher. Of course cactus wasn’t going to cut it. The word did not need to be spoken forcefully to have force.

“Turn around slowly.”

I did not want to get shot. That was the only principle. I pivoted carefully and asked, “Like this?”

It was an honest question. The timid sound of my voice must have de-escalated something; whatever the worst case he had prepared himself for did not happen. I heard him exhale.

“Yes. Like that.”

The efficiency with which he apprehended me was stunning. He cuffed both hands in what seemed to be a single motion. I glided across the yard and he dropped me off in the backseat without friction. At the station I was removed with the same elegance.

But then, no one else in my entire life has ever been as kind and hospitable to me as the Warden of the jail on that night. He was warm, charismatic, and personable. He chatted me up with the enthusiasm of an uncle and child. He asked me about my hometown, education, and job. He praised everything he could find. For not driving my rental car. For maintaining friendships. For having gone to college.

It struck me how good he was at customer service in a role that didn’t require it.

“This mugshot is actually badass.”

He wasn’t being ironic, I saw it. My hair was a wild mane. My tattoo stood out. It was, objectively, a strong mugshot.

When they had finished processing me, I drunkenly began a speech to thank the officers for their assistance.

There at some point I drifted away in my cell.

Hazing

March 30, 2026
Experience, Work
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I got hired at Port of Subs because Bobby and I had this strange form of recognition between us before I ever applied. I was just a regular who came in after class, but we talked like coworkers who hadn’t been hired together yet. We both had identity-through-work, the sense that being good at a job could stand in for having a self. And in a college town where the store got flooded with applicants every quarter, he brought me in on culture fit. It actually meant something. At that age, being chosen for anything felt like proof I was doing something right.

Once I started, the dynamic shifted fast. Bobby presented himself as the dedicated, service obsessed lead, the person who knew every quirk of the store and all the procedural trivia that made him feel important. Underneath that, he ran small power games that never stopped. Like most shifts, we worked in pairs, so writing the schedule gave him full control of who got along, who clashed, and who absorbed the burden of whatever he didn’t feel like doing. He avoided actual labor by assigning himself higher level tasks, though those tasks changed depending on what he didn’t want to touch that day.

One time he gave me the “Pepperoni test.” He just said everyone does it, you just have to slice ten pieces to an exact weight. He handed me the stack. I didn’t know it wasn’t real. I did what he asked and hit the number on the first try. Visibly baffled, he recalibrated the scale and told me to do it again. I hit it again. He didn’t react, no acknowledgement or recognition. He just shut down whatever he thought he was doing and never mentioned it again.

Jake was another issue. He had been there forever and treated that as an achievement. Right before I started, he got blackout drunk and broke his hand, so he couldn’t do anything except the register. He still outranked me because the owner liked him. He hated me immediately. Decided I was too confident on my first shift and turned that into some great character deficit. He complained to Bobby constantly. He started throwing pieces of meat at me instead of handing them over, waiting for me to drop one. I caught every piece. But he kept doing it, irritated each time I didn’t give him the result he wanted. But if I ever dropped one, it would be his fault. He would gain nothing if he was successful.

When the new girl was hired, everyone disliked her immediately. Too slow, too awkward, too much work to deal with. So Bobby assigned her to me. I mistook it for trust. It wasn’t. It was punishment. I treated her respectfully anyway, explained things clearly, and she adjusted fast. We became a solid team. When he asked how she was doing, I told him exactly that. He never put us on a shift together again. At the time I didn’t understand it, but looking back it’s obvious. Helping someone everyone else had written off was a kind of power, and I wasn’t allowed to have any.

Eventually I quit. I had worked hard in a place that rewarded nothing, and there was nothing left to push against. The dynamics weren’t special. The work wasn’t meaningful. And even when I excelled under impossible conditions, none of it mattered.

Sometimes you just lose, and that’s all there is to it.

feast & famine

November 13, 2012
Experience
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The principle of the “Feast & Famine” is based on an experience I had paying a hand reader for a reading of my prints.

feast & famine

The wind at your back, the lights are all green. Calm and serene, yet sharp and enthused. Life is rife with adventure and movement, and horizons span far and broad, unfettered by haze and fog and noise and clutter.

And everything falls into place.

But alas should the sails fall flat, which they do. The cellars are dry, and so am I, oh why? What did I do to deserve the glow, what have I done to lose it? Didn’t I care to nurture the flame, to waste not, want not, and never abuse it?

My beacon extinguished, can no one see me at all.

But I can still see them.

***

Once a man has changed the relationship between himself and his
environment, he cannot return to the blissful ignorance he left.
Motion, of necessity, involves a change in perspective.

— Commissioner Pravin Lal,

marriage vows

October 21, 2012
Experience
2 Comments

1. I sit in my cubicle, here on earth. When I die, they will put my body in a box and dispose of it in the cold ground. And in all the million ages to come, I will never breathe or laugh or twitch again. So won’t you run and play with me here among the teeming mass of humanity? The universe has spared us this moment.

2. We are gathered here in this place, in this time, in this way, as ensemble, that in unity with X and Y, we embark upon the journey from earthly impermanence to ascendance.

3. No longer mere people are we, but bright children of the stars. And together we shall dance in and out of ten billion years, celebrating the gift of consciousness until the stars themselves grow cold and weary, and our thoughts turn again to the beginning.

4. But when does life start but the when it is realized? Is not Living the virtue of Life? For what reason do we defer living in passion for the future? For what forgotten future do we concede our birthright? By what decree does Heaven reside atop an ivory tower, at which intersection Earth retains Her immutable separation?

5. Heaven lasts long, and Earth abides. What is the secret of their durability? Is it because they do not live for themselves that they endure so long?

6. It is not in life but in Relationship that eternity resides. And so in connecting to that which is greater than self, we may grow where we may have diminished. As said by Li Po:

7. We sit together,

the mountain and I,

until only the mountain remains.

8. Eternity lies ahead of us, and behind. X, have you drunk your fill? (No, I have not.) Y, have you drunk your fill? (No, I have not.)
9. From the delicate strands, between minds we weave out mesh: a blanket to warm the soul.

10. In this way your souls are bound together: no longer two, but as one. Like, kiss or whatever, if you want.

Note: The spacing is beyond my control.

cocaine disdain (v2)

October 18, 2012
Experience
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My experience with cocaine was disappointing. Though there are greater implications than just the high.

My friend N invited me to an outing – curiously, I barely know him, though we reliably kick it whenever I’m in town, which is infrequently. Of all the odd relationships I have with people, this one is particularly unusual. We live very unlike lives and have unlike values. However, there is an irrational fondness as the driving force behind our friendship. On this occasion, I learned he had begun to sell coke.

I’ve tried cocaine before and it was somewhat fun, though stupidly expensive. If you’re looking for a rush, speed punches harder, lasts longer, is more available, and cheaper. But it’s less romantic. Make no mistake, I am not advocating for substance experimentation; I have no moral framework guiding this account, and am reflecting on the process because I believe it’s unusual for someone in my position to have this experience: I barely know the dude, no one in his social network, and the standard lifestyle among them is very far removed from the lifestyle I live.

So I show up after the core group has dissipated, around 2:00 am. But there came a new wave of people, gradually, as a second “course” took over the night. Everyone was boozing pretty tough, though I stayed dry through the evening. N’s phone became notably active at this time, many a conversation presumably going as thus (I only heard half).

Caller: “What are you doing tonight?”

N: “Drugs, man. Come over.”

So the folks en route came for coke. Turns out N was actually at work through the format of partying. The group was held together by him and his power to provide you with a $5 line, and he was very good at facilitating. I like the dude for his charisma, although he rolls with a much harder crowd than me, and so necessarily has an edgier front in said company. But when not in line for a line, you’re on your own to mingle and roam. Partying is a social event, right?

Anyrate, it’s 2:00 am as the ball gets rolling (a curiously appropriate drug euphemism.)

Some pleasantries. “Would you like to do some cocaine?”

“Yeah.”

So I did.

No real euphoria, and no mania, unlike everyone else. I felt calm, alert, tranquil, and reserved. Everyone else, on the other hand, became radically altered. Aggressive. Tweaky. Quite frankly, stupider. Even me: I tried to write about the event when I got home and had a jumble of garbage to review in the morning.

It also seemed to incite rap battling. I mean, people do this. I know people do this, but here I was. And I was impressed.

I effectively managed to blend in. In the beginning, I had no idea what these people were doing to socialize, and I stayed so long in part because I was trying to figure out how they managed to appear engaged while not actually saying or doing anything. If I were to watch any one person for a time, I came to realize they were all functionally doing the same thing as me. This is why my technique was fitting in. Being aloof in a normal social setting is uncomfortable, but here it was necessary.

A rap-off is a monologue. Taking a line is a transaction. A greeting follows a script of social cues. Making a drink justifies your presence in the room. Going out for a smoke gives you purpose to leave and return. In none of this is there the substance of interpersonal relating. But here, no one was the wiser.

What I have taken away from this experience: How often in day-to-day interaction do we suffer through this same oppressive act, settling for the facade that there’s humanity all around us? All the while we try and forget that it is all an illusion, and we are locked in a cage of maddening solitude. A great thirst awash at sea.

Here we were with all the coke and liquor to keep our hands busy and our minds numb. As thus do we refrain from going insane.

N kept insisting I was his best friend through the night. Coke talk, though it was, he was probably right.

pheromones part 1

September 8, 2012
Experience
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I came up with the fantasy of dousing my resume in a pheromone tincture to make it more appealing to an employer. People like people for pretty damn arbitrary reasons, as it is.

So simmering on this idea for a year, I finally took to researching the market for synthetic pheromones — types, brands, and efficacy. This report will contain summary findings of my research (in no particular order), and I expect to write a series of entries based on my experience in actuating this experiment.

Pheromones influencing organisms’ actions and attitudes is a real phenomenon. However, the effects on humans are questionable, as is the entire notion of applying a synthetic pheromone product to achieve ‘results.’ This whole category approaches snake oil territory. A wearer’s confidence is improved upon belief in their effectiveness, though let’s not discredit the placebo effect — it is, afterall, a real result. Part of the difficulty in the scientific community backing synthetic pheromones with supportive proof is that social interaction is a very multifaceted experience and it’s very challenging to break it down with certainty.

The best material I found in my research was anecdotal. I have seen reference to supposed scientific evidence, but I can find no sufficiently credible document. I won’t yet link to the specific product I ended up selecting because I’m not endorsing anything or anyone.

On to my findings/interpretations: I’ve discovered there are two basic paradigms of pheromone product, social and sexual. Within either camp are a myriad of ‘flavors’ that nuance the supposed effect. My initial motivator was to use them for non-sexual purposes, so that is where I am putting most of my attention. A social pheromone affects aspects such as talkativeness, trust, and status. I find the discussion on status to be the most interesting — a lot of pheromone products are marketed to improve status; to be an alpha male/female, or even to incorporate “beta” pheromones to soften the edge.

One can absolutely sense the presence of an Alpha on an intuitive plane. I’ve long believed a person’s status frequently does not align with actions, behaviors; or, necessarily, any justification. Though attitude is an essential part of this social type, consider the logic behind the “American dream;” anyone who works hard enough can rise their way up to being a rich 1%er. Lol.

I find it vindictive to believe this quality can be attributed to something controllable.  I’m not the Alpha type; some people walk all over me, and some people adore me. The theory that status is derived from a chemical taste preference would suitably explain the experience: Some people respond to a person’s mix of pheromones so that they perceive that person as having status. Some people have a more universally accepted scent.

But I didn’t go down that path in my selection, I chose the talkative/trust option. Although I should meditate on exactly why this felt like the correct choice to me, intuitively I would explain that ‘Alpha’ people piss me off and so there was no appeal in that scene.

On to my experience, so far. Note: I haven’t received my order yet.

Whenever I get an idea, I love to talk about it with my friends or constituents. This means I told a lot of core people in my circle about my interest in, research of, and purchase of social pheromones; and also shared this information with the perspective of having faith in all of it.

So it came about that, last night, my buddy asked me if I got my order yet. I took this as an opportunity to try a ruse; I said yes, and pointed out all the effects they were having on everyone. Unfortunately, my temporary, subletting roommate does not satisfy the “core person” denomination in my circle. She had a particular reaction.

Pheromone use can come off rather clandestine, manipulative, and arrogant. Well, because it is. Friends of mine may think that’s cool; someone I’m not particularly close with could be put off.

It was a very small window of interaction (I only pulled the ruse for two minutes or so), but in this span, she very ostensibly ignored me, ultimately telling me she was. She left the room after I explained I was trolling.

(Note: “ostensibly ignored me” is the best I can explain a compound social cue. Actually this experience is what precipitated this entire blog entry and so I’m disappointed the actual story took one line once I got to it.)

The ruse drew the opposite effect of my stated goals when it came under scrutiny. Well, even if pheromones “work” I expect the results would be the same in a similar situation.

So the moral of Part 1 of my story: Pheromones are psychosomatic. More to be posted when I receive and test my order.