Your Thursday Regret: Pink Floyd

It is fairly common knowledge that back in the day I was a major consumer of alcohol. The popularly-tossed-about figure is "a bottle of vodka a day," and while that is a slight oversimplification it's close enough to accurate for our purposes (our purposes being, for this feature, a bizarre mix of nostalgia and mordant self-criticism). What is slightly less-known, or at least less-publicized, is that I was a recreational user of complex pharmaceuticals at the time as well, though certainly not to anything close to the same extent.

All the big words in that sentence were chosen with exquisite care. (Hm, there I go again.) "Recreational" and "complex pharmaceuticals" are the keys there - it was hardly a regular or even semi-regular thing, and your garden variety narcotics held no interest for me. I was a pills guy back in college, and when it came to pills I had one rule: up, up, gotta be up. This isn't that surprising when you consider the massive quantities of depressants I was ingesting at the time - taking Quaaludes on top of Absolut is not only a good way to ease yourself into hypotensive brain death, but it doesn't provide you with any sort of different experience; it's just more of the same. Plus, I don’t know if they even still MAKE Quaaludes. No, I was a stimulant guy, the more exotic the better. It is interesting to note that I don't directly recall ever taking stims while I was drinking, indicating that while my body was clearly trying to kill itself it apparently wasn't in any sort of actual rush to do so.

It is also distinctly possible that my taste for chemical enrichment did not extend beyond little while AWAKE! pills because one time around my 18th birthday I was at a party and I watched a guy drop acid. As I stood there drinking a screwdriver whose color was best described as a thin, pale, semi-transparent light yellow he proceeded to have what I still consider to be the Freakout of the Millenium.

This guy went BERSERK.

I've hallucinated before; never from drugs, just lack of sleep. I distinctly remember a class my sophomore year when I hadn't slept in about 40 hours previous and the print in my British Literature textbook turned bright red and started sliding back and forth across the page, and when I looked up the room was full of smoke. A few months back, driving home from New York in the middle of the night I started seeing cars and trees that weren't actually there. As hallucinations go they're kinda lame. The real problem with hallucinating isn't so much that you see all kinda of wacky shit but that moment when the conscious part of your brain realizes that you're seeing things that aren't there. THAT is what fucks you up, your conscious mind not being able to handle the disconnect between what you're seeing and what is real.

But this guy back at this party, oh my goodness, he just lost his shit. He was running around the room like his life depended on it, having shouted conversations with people no one else could see; he'd stop every few seconds and try to swat away imaginary insects from the air around his body; he'd clutch various limbs and body parts as though he were afraid they'd fly away. I believe the appropriate drug culture term for what he experienced is "a bad trip." No kidding. When he started screaming about "the monster" I finished my screwdriver, politely excused myself, and vowed never, ever, ever in my life to take LSD.

I have occasionally wondered in the years since if not ever taking LSD is what eventually led to the erosion of my love of Pink Floyd, but I'm pretty sure now it probably wasn't that. If acid usage and the concomitant flashbacks are necessary elements to enjoying a band I'm pretty sure the band wasn't that good to begin with.

The weird thing about Floyd is that unlike a lot of the things I've talked about here I can't remember what it was that made me actually like them in the first place. Back in high school I saw them in concert, for Chrissakes, and I have NO IDEA WHY. It was just one of those things you did back then. To an extent, I suppose, everyone discovers music - I mean really discovers that they actually have a musical taste, even if for most people it's laughably bad - in mid-to-late high school somewheres, and if you don't go hip-hop or country it seems that sooner or later, before you get to college, you're into Pink Floyd. It boggles the mind.

So I go off to college and I have all these Pink Floyd CDs. I did the whole bit with Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz around, I dunno, junior year or so, and even though I was still into Floyd I had long since determined that I really fucking hate the Wizard of Oz, so even drunk it wasn't as impressive as it probably should have been. I listened - looking back on it I honestly can't believe this - to Dark Side and The Wall OVER AND OVER AGAIN. What was I THINKING? At one point when I couldn't find my copy of The Wall I actually borrowed one from someone else and NEVER RETURNED IT. This is how much I was into Pink Floyd back then and looking back I really can't figure out what the hell I was doing.

There are still bits I like, to be sure. "One Of These Days" still works on some sort of primal level in a way I really enjoy (plus it reminds me of Life on Mars), and, since hearing it on the radio on the way to class earlier this week was what got me thinking about this whole thing in the first place, the line in "Run Like Hell" that goes "if they catch you in the backseat trying to pick her locks," as rock and roll metaphors go that's really just outstandingly good.

But honestly, my disillusionment with Floyd came into being a couple months back when I was driving someplace without my iPod and "Comfortably Numb" came on the air, and while I was sitting at a red light listening to it I just said out loud to my empty car, "what the fuck is this song about?" I couldn't come up with anything. My mind drifted as I drove - it was on Bustleton Avenue, I remember that, though God knows why I remember it or what I was doing there - and I realized I couldn't think of what a SINGLE Floyd song was really about beyond, I dunno, sounding neat.

I haven't done anything drastic like erase all the Pink Floyd from my iTunes - honestly Floyd sliding in my estimation must have started a long time ago because there isn't a whole hell of a lot of it in there, so at some point my albums disappeared for good and I didn't notice - because it's not like their music is offensively awful (like some other people we've talked about here). I just don't understand what I ever saw in it in the first place, and the fact that I am unable to determine my own motivations pisses me off more than anything else.

JLK