Lindsay Beckman read and liked Jon Bruenning's review of Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist:

"Disclaimer: There is nothing review-like about the following paragraphs

Chalk this one up to important life lessons. Let me explain. I went to graduate school for architecture. For those not familiar, it is a fairly intensive and rigorous ...more Disclaimer: There is nothing review-like about the following paragraphs

Chalk this one up to important life lessons. Let me explain. I went to graduate school for architecture. For those not familiar, it is a fairly intensive and rigorous process that is organized around a studio culture. Architecture studios are notorious. End sentence. As a design studio it is in this halfway land between the free-wheeling nature of artistic endeavors and the type of intellectual rigor that requires hours of dedication on tedious manual and intellectual efforts that go largely unnoticed and unappreciated. So it attracts strange people; myself being one of them. A part of my education was spent immersed in a studio environment in Helsinki, Finland. The way these studios work is this: a program (building typology and site) is given at the beginning of the semester; the rest of the semester is spent designing and presenting your ideas to be bandied about by your peers, professors, and local and international professionals. Needless to say, you develop tough skin and an ability to communicate ideas through various means and methods. Or you sink rapidly.

Halfway through this semester in Helsinki (the project I was working on was a Tove Jansson library) I took a break and traveled around Northern Europe by train. Part of this trip consisted of my first visit to Amsterdam. At the time of this trip, I was a 25 year old man that had a good amount of experience with a wide variety of drugs in all manners of quantity and quality. These are all experiences I have never regretted. At that point in my life, however, I was mostly done with this “experimentation” and settled into my own preferential cocktail of mind-altering substances mostly consisting of grain alcohols with the occasional amphetamine for those nights that call for it. Unsurprisingly this personal choice went a long way to helping me fit in with these frozen faced vodka acolytes in the land of one thousand lakes.

Back to Amsterdam. I was traveling with my girlfriend at the time; a Finnish woman that had never smoked pot before. So we had to partake of the coffee shops and all they had to offer. At the bar we were shown a cd case that contained little 5-gram samples of all of the different varieties of pot they had there, with descriptions of the type of high, so you knew exactly what you were getting. I picked out this crazy looking purple nug named Purple Haze whose written description fails me, but from my own experience I can only describe as some kind of weird hybrid of pot and Adderall. By that I mean that it feels like you stepped in a hole, but while you are in that hole you feel like you can concentrate so hard that you can levitate yourself out of that hole. And it would be fucking beautiful, man. Fucking Beautiful. This is pertinent information for later.

Anyway. I liked it. It made my girlfriend loopy and all she did was (literally) bounce around Amsterdam. So she never smoked again. And I had enough left over that I brought some back to Helsinki with me.

Upon returning to Helsinki, the work resumed. One night while working in the studio alone with one of my closest friends, and probably the only person in that particular studio with me that would partake, we decided to smoke the Purple Haze and enjoy the early spring night. Our studio had a huge balcony overlooking the harbor near market square. So we smoked a joint and went back inside to continue working on our projects. For the rest of the night I was working my way through that Purple Haze/Adderall hole of supreme concentration. I thought I was doing ground-breaking shit. Trace paper and graphite was flying…meanwhile, my buddy did not get shit done. I am not really sure what he was doing, but if I ever managed to look up it did seem he was busy. Maybe the hole he was in made him think he needed to re arrange his life in groundbreaking ways and this manifested itself with a perpetual physical motion that was an outward representation of whatever internal processes his Purple Haze rattled brain was working through. But I had clarity, man. I worked through the night and into the morning. Eventually ending up alone in the studio after my friend organized his way back into chaos and decided sleep was the remedy. Although he did look at me askew as he left. This was after my explanation of what I was doing with my library. The connection was not made because that motherfucker was high and did not know what the fuck he was talking about. At the end of that session, my project had completely changed. I thought it was amazing. Nobody had ever seen shit like this before. And then I walked home in the electric blue light of the typical Finnish early spring morning. The water in the bay was so still it was a mirror. I still remember it as being one of the most peaceful and beautiful walks I have ever taken in my life.

The next afternoon I walked back to the studio with the excitement still alive from the previous night’s accomplishments. I was the last to arrive and I felt like my peers were looking at me funny. They had already looked over my project, and had apparently been made aware of the extracurricular activities that accompanied this new scheme. I had not seen my project again yet. We looked it over together and I realized I had no explanation for any of the decisions I made except for “I was high and thought it was fuckin’ bad-ass.” I knew this would not fly when presenting to my professors and local professionals so I decided to think up some other rationalizations in order to cover myself. Already the slow creep of post Purple Haze lucidity was descending over my own understanding of the previous night’s happenings. But still. I had to move forward with this or else lose face; because I already had a pretty great project before this misstep.

My professor was Finnish. That day I sat there and tried to explain away these new lines and forms and ideas on my paper with the typical archi-babble that exists in all academic institutions. It is important to note that Finnish nuance happens to be a completely different animal than the average run-of-the-mill American nuance that is mostly just our underlying cynicism masked with a false sincerity. Finnish nuance can only be communicated with a straight face and wide ranging tones of non-verbal responses -- mmMMM’s that go up in register at the end, and the occasional jooOOO (yes) that means neither yes in the affirmative, nor yes as an acknowledgment of understanding, but was rather a yes infused with much more judgment and was to be read as a verbal “sizing-up.” It is somewhat akin to the American “I see” but is much more nuanced…in the way Eskimos have 30 words (or something like that) for snow. I had become finely attuned to these nuanced non-verbal reactions to the point I could write a thesis on them. So over the course of my describing this new overnight sensation in Finnish library design, I kept hearing these non-verbal responses slowly creeping up the register until one of his mmMMMM’s tailed off at the end damn near the register of one of Satchmo’s high C’s, I realized I needed to back pedal and return to the normalcy of my pre Purple Haze design iteration. So I bowed out with the old “let me think about this for a bit.”

And then I returned things to normal.

That night I went to sleep stone cold sober (giving away the reserves of my Dutch delights earlier that evening) and reading this book by HST. It is at this point that I came to a realization that an unfortunately large percentage of people never seem to reach – most people are way less interesting under the influence of drugs. And. I happen to be one of those people much more interesting when I am not on drugs. It is a good life lesson to learn, I think. Which is the point of the story. And is in no small way related to HST.
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