Dispatches #166: Smashed gods, stall catchers and very bad trips

Welcome to Dispatches, a weekly summary of my writing, listening and reading habits. I'm Raisul Hasan, a freelance journalist and author based in Brisbane, Australia. (No 'sounds' this week, though.)
Words:
I had a story published in Good Weekend on Saturday. Excerpt below.
Risky Business (3,400 words / 17 minutes)

How a bad LSD trip taught one Sydney teenager to think twice about experimenting with drugs

Tom* closes his eyes, settles back on his bed, breathes in the aromatherapy oil he's burning and listens to psychedelic trance while waiting for the onset of the trip from the LSD he's just swallowed. It's 8pm on a Friday night this year, he's home alone in the sanctuary of his bedroom and he tells himself that this is his reward for finishing his exams (except for business studies, which he doesn't care about). Within moments, the 17-year-old's heart rate goes up, butterflies flutter in his stomach and waves of colour dance across his field of vision, regardless of whether he closes or opens his eyes. This is the fifth time he's taken the hallucinogen, the first four with no unpleasant side effects, so he's trying a double dose to see whether the sensations become more intense.

Tom takes precautions: he uses a drug-testing kit he bought from a "hippie store" near his house to make sure the drug is LSD rather than a more risky synthetic alternative. He cuts a tiny sliver from one of the tabs and drops it into a glass tube containing a small amount of liquid. He watches as the sample reacts to the chemicals, turning dark purple, indicating its purity. Satisfied, Tom eats four tiny pieces of LSD-soaked blotting paper known as "tabs".

The trip starts well, reaching an idyllic plateau, but the come-up keeps climbing – and with it, his anxiety. He doesn't hear his dad Karl* unexpectedly arrive home and climb the stairs. Sitting at his desk, Tom is so shocked when his dad opens his bedroom door that he can barely speak and doesn't make eye contact. So odd is his behaviour that his father imagines he's walked in on his son masturbating. Embarrassed, he bids his son good night – he's off to meet Tom's mum Jasmine* at a fund-raising dinner across town – and closes the door.

Tom is alone again, and the drug's effects continue to intensify. Trying to counteract the restlessness he's feeling, he walks onto the second-floor balcony off his bedroom and paces up and down. By now losing his sense of reality, Tom tries talking to himself in a bid to sort out the strange thoughts invading his mind. "Who's doing this to you?" he asks, raising his voice. "Who's doing this?"

Neighbours hear this bizarre phrase ringing out from the balcony. At first, they don't associate the deep voice with Tom: it sounds almost Satanic. In the darkness, they can faintly see a figure pacing back and forth. They call out, asking if he's all right. Well-known as an early morning runner, and well-liked as a trusted babysitter to several families in this quiet, affluent neighbourhood in Sydney's north where he's spent most of his life, Tom is clearly not himself. The family cats are howling, too, apparently as disturbed by his behaviour as the onlookers.

From the balcony, Tom scampers up onto the tiled roof, but loses his footing. A round, wooden table in the front yard breaks his fall not far from the edge of the swimming pool. The force of his weight smashes the furniture to pieces but he miraculously avoids serious injury. A concerned neighbour rings 000. Tom may be bleeding, but he's still got the speed of a cross-country athlete and seemingly superhuman strength, despite his reed-thin frame. He rushes back inside his house, tracking blood through different rooms, before smashing a back fence then running onto the street again, tearing off his clothes.
To read the full story, visit http://www.smh.com.au/good-weekend/how-experimenting-with-lsd-nearly-shattered-a-sydney-teenagers-life-20170928-gyqe21.html .
Above illustration credit: http://www.clemenshabicht.com/
How I found this story: This one came to me after the June publication of a story for the same magazine, http://www.smh.com.au/good-weekend/why-i-cancelled-my-scheduled-lsd-trip-20170515-gw5jde.html , , where I wrote about my own (largely positive) experiences with psychedelic drug use. A reader emailed me to say: "LSD is like a monster in our house, sucking all the potential and opportunity out of my beautiful son... as well as creating massive stress for the entire family," wrote a mother based in Sydney, who is quoted in the story under the pseudonym Jasmine. "Let me tell you from my experience (and by the way, I am no LSD virgin), that for our precious kids, LSD is plain playing with fire. They can't evaluate the high levels of risk versus the perceived mind 'expanding' benefits, and they are basically ending up, for want of a better word, completely fucked."

From that initial email, we began a correspondence, as I was interested in learning more about her son's experience. My editors at Good Weekend agreed it was a good idea to work on this as a follow-up to the first story, and so I travelled to Sydney in August to meet and speak with the family in question.

I have been writing about illicit drug use for about five years now, and I have always tried to balance depictions of the potential risks and rewards associated with the decision to use drugs of any sort. This one strikes the most cautious tone of my writing to date, and that's by design, as I think it's unreasonably dangerous for teenagers to be experimenting with powerful drugs like LSD – especially while alone, without any responsible persons to supervise them, per the concept of 'set and setting' that I outlined in Trips To Remember. I highly doubt I would have had the maturity or insight to handle a bad trip such as Tom's when I was 17 years old, and I hope that this article is useful for encouraging parents to open up some frank discussions with their children about a difficult subject.
Reads:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/audio/a27913/u2-tour-every-night-perfect/ by Kevin Dupzyk and James Lynch in Popular Mechanics (5,900 words / 29 minutes). Close readers of Dispatches will have noted several article recommendations based on U2's American tour of their classic album The Joshua Tree. I'm not particularly obsessed with this band, I swear. I like them just fine, but for some reason this tour has inspired plenty of excellent writing about U2's music and its place in popular culture. This is the best such article I've yet seen, and it's different to the personal essays I've mentioned here before. It's an exhaustively reported read about something I've idly wondered about as a concertgoer: namely, what are the minute-by-minute mechanics and logistics of assembling, troubleshooting and breaking down the huge stage productions used by globe-trotting bands like U2, who also happen to use the world's largest mobile video screen in their concerts? If you've ever wondered the same thing, you'll probably love this read as much as I did. Brilliant, original reporting. I'm grateful.
DAY 4: 9:45 p.m. Four songs in. The people at the barricades had to come to the stadium on two separate occasions to secure this spot. The diehards. The people whose backs are lists of old U2 tour dates; the people draped in Irish flags. They came to MetLife Stadium last night, when everything was barely set up–the spotlights yet to be tested, the sound mix yet to be perfected–just to get a number inscribed on their wrists in permanent marker. And they came back today–doors opened at 5 p.m., but they were here long before that, because that is who they are–and presented their markings, the lower the better, to an employee of Live Nation, the massive touring company, and were walked in to grab a choice position at the 20-yard-line barricades directly in front of the drum kit. U2 started the show on the 45-yard line, but four songs in they're taking center stage for the main event: The Joshua Tree, their first huge record, is 30 years old and on this tour they're playing it in full. The diehards are ready to lose their minds. Their numbered hands are poised to clap, and make raised fists, and wave cellphones into the jet stream of the biggest touring band in the world. But the screen makes everyone equal. The screen means it doesn't matter where you sit. U2 has always been about equal rights for all. The screen is 196 feet wide and 45 feet tall. It fills the end zone and red zone of the north end of the field, blotting out entire sections of stands. It's the most advanced touring screen in the world, built specifically for U2: 11.4 million pixels of almost unnerving 8K clarity. It's nearly all carbon fiber, light and strong–so much carbon fiber that a spool of it the width of a sidewalk would be four miles long. U2 wanted it even bigger, but they realized anything wider wouldn't fit in the football stadiums where they would play. Football stadiums. As the band plays the first ethereal chords and pounding bass drum that start the first song of the album, "Where the Streets Have No Name," the screen explodes with light: soaring black-and-white footage of the empty two-lanes of the American West. It's a glorious moment. The diehards suddenly find themselves stuck in the front row of a movie theater–still not a bad spot, in this theater–while the people in the cheap seats (which are not cheap at all) experience a stunning panorama. Equal rights for all.
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David