Tuesday, October 10, 2006

ask palinode #9: drugs and violence edition

Cenobyte, she is my most prolific questioner-askioner so far. Today she ask:

I have some other questions. Is there a daily quota on the number of questions any one emailer may send?

Does toad-licking really make you hallucinate?

If Queen Bee is on a train leaving Pasadena is travelling 90 miles per hour going west and Worker Bee is on a small, privately chartered airplane from Little Compton travelling east at 300 miles per hour, when and where will Queen Bee's path intersect with Worker Bee's path, if one drew a straight line representing each journey in a two-dimensional representation?

#1. That's one for the FAQs. There is, in point of fact, no limit on questions, quantitative or qualitative. You can ask me anything you want, as much as you want, by the barrel, carried in sacks, moved in lead-lined containers by dead of night. It doesn't matter. Prepositions or adverbs, interrogative or nominative, participle or gerund, I'll take them all on and leave them bruised and quivering on the mat. Eight rounds running and I'm the welterweight champion of response. Biznatches!

Bear in mind, o biznatches, that I try, however feebly, to be timely with my answers. That means that if you ask me twenty questions at once, they will necessarily be short, curt, brusque, rude, nasty, and combative like a mo'fo. Or just brief. Better that you ask one well-chosen question and be rewarded with buckets of bullshit, instead of asking twenty questions and getting a few turds in return.

As always, the Ask Palinode project is, like the rest of this weblog, a small affair intended for the amusement of me and my close friends, whose definition I freely and gladly extend to all visitors. Even the ones who come from Google looking for 'anal sex man'.

#2. Tooooaaaaad. Many are the lives ruined by the licking of the smooth cold length of amphibian back - the secretions propelling the innocent into a nightmare demesne of fabricated terrors - intricate geometries of hell - the warty architecture of Satan's palace. Did you know that Satan had a palace? It's open to the public from May to September, with tours twice daily. Great Labour Day Weekend package specials, but don't phone for bookings. You can not get past the voice message system.

The short answer to your question is: Hell, yeah! Toad licking is a sure-fire legitimate way to hallucinate. As far as the nerdy men in the white coats know, toad venom is the only animal-produced hallucinogen occurring in nature (other animal toxins may cause you to hallucinate, but those hallucinations are usually of the long-tunnel-and-bright-lights variety). Before you go around licking toads, there are a few guidelines that you should follow:

Know your toads. Most people think that the cane toad, or bufo marinus, is the one to lick. Do not lick this toad. Their venom will burn your lips and tongue and make you sick as a dog (and it kills dogs). In other words, not a groovy high. Also, cane toads are insanely ugly little beasts that spread like a bad rash. They pretty much embody everything that's wrong with nature.

What you want to go a' licking is the bufo alvarius, or Sonoran Desert toad, the legendary vision toad of somewhere or other. This one contains both bufotenin and DMT, which makes it a pretty good buy for the money. DMT is also found in ayahuasca, that crazy shaman vine from the South Americas.

The toad venom can be licked straight from the toad's back, or harvested and then dried and smoked. I suppose you could snort it as well, but the idea of sniffing hallucinogenic toad dandruff up your nose doesn't sound like fun to me. The effects are short-lived but intense. Remember, DMT doesn't just kick your neurotransmitters around a bit; the stuff actually latches on to your receptors and offers a toady version of reality, which one user described as "being shot from a rifle barrel lined with baroque paintings and landing in a sea of electricity". I heard that on CBC radio once.

The real question is, are those toads high all the time? Because if I had a couple of glands on the back of my neck that dribbled out heavy drugs, I wouldn't be spending money on a night out, if you catch my drift. Maybe the toads ingest so much that they don't even know they're high. Maybe they just hop around and think "time to get shot out of the baroque rifle barrel again" like it's no big deal.

Hey, waittasec -- what if we're the ones who are constantly high but don't know it? What if we only see reality when we're stoned? What if toad venom is our gateway into reality? Whoah. Whoooaaah.

Whoooaaaaah.


#3. You didn't mention which states were involved in your math problem, so I'm going to assume that you're referring to Pasadena, California and Little Compton, Rhode Island. First, do these bees belong to the same hive? I only ask because the difference in latitude suggests that these two bees may not even be of the same species. My biggest worry is that Queen Bee may in fact be the Africanized 'killer bee,' and she may be traveling west to populate the whole land with vicious killer bees in a stingy orgy of reverse Manifest Destiny.

Meanwhile, the worker bee in her charter jet is racing east to stop the onrush of Africanized bee violence. That's no mean feat for one bee, exiled from her hive for Bee Crimes, seeking redemption in a mission to keep America bee-pure. But she has lots of cash, which softens the blow a bit. At least I'm pretty sure she's got cash, or at least some kind of benefactor on the side of the European-descended bees. Otherwise, where'd the charter flight come from? Bake sales? Clearly the Africanized bee is poor, consigned to riding the rails in order to propagate her hive.

It's not just a question of where they will meet, it's when: Can the heroic European worker bee get to the Africanized queen bee in time to stop Africanized bees from selling the drugs supplied to them by the Jew bees to all the hard-working but tragically naive Euro-descended bees? And once they meet, will the corrupted socialist bureaucracy of liberal do-gooders stop the worker bee before she can carry out her mission? Will those liberals enlist their liberal media shock troops to perform a 'hit' job on the admirable worker bee?

Frankly, Cenobyte, I'm a bit put off by the subtle-but-discernible racist undertones in your question. But I'll give it a shot.

Here is the best possible route between Little Compton, colonial fishing village non pareil, and Pasadena, the city where Griffin Mill murdered David Kahane over a screenplay:

If Queen Bee departs from Pasadena heading east by train and the Worker bee heads west by plane, the two will never meet. The Worker Bee will be traveling at least 37000 feet above the Queen Bee. Worker Bee will fly in a straight line until its fuel runs out over the Pacific, whereupon it will fall into the ocean. Meanwhile, the Queen Bee will take the train to Atlantic City, where she will play some craps and a few rounds of blackjack. Later she stings someone and dies.

Update: On second glance it seems that I misread the question. The train leaving Pasadena is heading west, not east. Likewise for Worker Bee in her chartered plane. This changes things a bit. Queen Bee travels first from Pasadena to the nearest train station in Glendale. She boards the train and then travels west, straight into the Pacific Ocean. Meanwhile, Worker Bee takes a bus to the Newport State Airport (ironically just outside of Middleton), hops a Dash-8 to Newark and books a continental flight to Madrid by way of London. At the last TSA security decide that her stinger is a weapon. Also, she doesn't have a proper container for her honey. She moons around the airport for a while, threatens a TSA official. They arrest her, cart her away to an offshore prison, where she spends the rest of her life futilely filing appeals and asking for a lawyer.

Are you of the question-asking mind? I will answer absolutely any question you put to me. Just send me an email at askpalinode @ gmail . com.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

So we should lick Keanu Reeves? Because I can do that.

palinode said...

Yes, you should lick Keanu Reeves. Mr. Reeves secretes a milky toxin from glands on his neck. Ingesting the toxin produces a series of vivid hallucinations that you're having the hot monkey sex with him. But you are not. You are lying flat on the floor with a glazed expression and a string of drool trailing from your mouth. Mr. Reeves bends down and extracts a small sample of your blood with a syringe. Then he screams out to the night and flaps away on dark musky wings. No lie.

Anonymous said...

Wow, I didn't know he had that much going on. It sounds complicated and I really thought he'd be more about simple dumb fun. How about Josh Homme? What if I lick him?

Mr. Head said...

Okay. Can't resist this one. I did smoke it and it was the most wondrous and terrifying psychedelic experience of my life. Shortly after exhaling just one hit, I began to hear a rising hum. Then everything in my field of vision began to vibrate in concert with this hum. Then a carpet of interlocking squares and circles, in primary and opposing colours floated up out of the floor and wrapped around me. There were a couple of seconds where I became convinced I had killed myself, and then I was having the most intimate conversation with this alien/angel entity, covered in shifting fractal patterns, that assured me everything was alright, that it had been with me since birth. There were other more important messages, but I am unable to translate them into words. After the entity went away, I was led, by the friend who gave me this, back and forth through the woods by hand. Because I could not see through all the colours. I saw and spoke with dead relatives, and saw a never ending staircase down which everyone I've ever met passed by me. Upon returning to baseline, I remember being so amazed by printed letters and numbers on signs and license plates, as if I'd never seen them before. I thought this experience had been going on for about six hours, and it turned out to be only twenty minutes. After being "down" for a few minutes I felt fine, with no after effects except my amazement. All this happened around me with no physical rush or buzz to associate it with. It was like I never changed at all, but the world did around me.

palinode said...

That's what happens when you lick Josh Homme.

Anonymous said...

Sweeeeeet.

Mr. Head said...

Who's Josh Homme? Where can I hook up with some of that shit? LOL

Anonymous said...

He IS! I'd never made that connection but he's totally like a Some Kind of Wonderful-era Stolz with a lot more badness thrown in. Perfection.

Mr. Head said...

They've also discovered a hallucinogenic fish, but the name escapes me. Whoa, did anybody else just see that??